


history

by twentyone



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Bottom Zayn, Crying, Hong Kong, Hot Tub Sex, LA, M/M, Rough Sex, also bottom liam, bit angsty, they all just miss each other, zayn trips on acid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:58:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6998701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twentyone/pseuds/twentyone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn left the band in March. Eight months later, he returns to visit the boys in LA.</p><p>In which Zayn is great at messing up, Liam is still confused, and both of them are shit at communication. Oh, and the other boys try to offer helpful advice but mainly end up kissing each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. guess i should've caught your call, i just had to waste the phone forget it all

**Author's Note:**

> I edited and added hella shit to this first part. hope u enjoy it

LA, November 2015

 

"He's what?" 

Liam came to consciousness to the familiar raised voice of Louis coming from the kitchen. He blinked his eyes groggily and rolled over onto his stomach, hand fumbling beneath the pillows for his phone. He extracted it just as Niall replied in a much calmer voice,

"Mate, calm the fuck down, yeah. I'm just telling you what he said, so don't piss off at me."

"I don't give a bloody fuck, Niall, if he wants to step foot into our house, he can grow a pair and ask me himself."

"Yeah, but Louis, you haven't spoken to him in a month, I just didn't think you'd want to-"

"What, throw the door wide open? You're goddamn right, that's the last thing I want to do."

"Louis, please, just-"

"Just what, Niall?

Liam sat up in bed, interest piqued. Beside him, Harry was still asleep, oblivious to the rising conversation. Throwing back the covers, Liam stood up quietly and padded out of the enormous bedroom and into the doorway of the expansive, marble-topped kitchen. Louis had his back to him, hunched over. Niall was sitting at the countertop, coffee mug in hand. 

"Just stop being a wanker and-"

"Fuck. You. And fuck him, too. If you really think I'm gonna let him into this house after what he did to-"

Liam took this as his cue to step into the kitchen and coughed loudly. Louis spun around and Niall groaned. 

"What's going on?" Liam asked cautiously, edging in further. Niall opened his mouth but Louis beat him to it, of course. 

"Zayn wants to come. Here." 

"And he is coming," Niall interjected before Louis could throw in another unfavorable remark, but Liam didn't really hear him. His heartbeat had suddenly picked up like a train rolling out of the station and into open country side, thudding rhythmically and drowning out the noise of Louis and Niall's continued argument. He slowly walked over to the ceiling-height windows and stared out at the LA city line bathed in 10 am light, bright and hard. 

He hadn't seen Zayn in months, but it felt like years, given that they had practically lived together for the last half-decade of their lives. Going from being with someone day in and day out, to poof - nothing - it was like a bucket of cold water had been doused over Liam's head. Of course all of them had known for weeks prior that he would be leaving them, and even then it hadn't come as a shock. But still, nothing could have prepared Liam, or any of them really, for what life would be like without Zayn in it beside them. 

They had each reacted drastically differently, when the time came, which was to be expected. Harry was frighteningly distraught for a day; he broke several flower vases in their hotel room and burned the towels in the bathtub, setting off the fire alarm. Then he retreated into a sulky silence for a week before calling Zayn and having an hours-long conversation over Skype, during which he locked himself on the roof so as to be completely alone.

Niall had been the go-to supportive friend, calming Harry down when he was angry and holding him while he cried. 

Niall was also there when Louis called Zayn at five in the morning screaming bloody murder over the phone, which resulted in Louis being phone-less for a few days after Niall was forced to toss his phone out of the hotel window when Louis wouldn't stop howling "fuck your fucking dickhole" into it. 

And Liam.

There were times when Liam felt as though he couldn't breathe. His chest would seize up, as though some giant hand was squeezing his heart into pulp inside of him, a hand with a stupid mandala tattoo and a cigarette between index and middle finger. There were times when, in the middle of the night, he would roll over into nothing, into a bare patch of cold sheet and pillow, and wake up confused at the lack of warmth. And god knew the number of times that he would pull out his phone, in a drunken haze, and search for Zayn's number in his contacts before remembering that he had deleted it for his own good, because if given the chance to press that green button and if Zayn picked up, Liam knew he would open his big stupid mouth and tell him how much he missed Zayn and-

"Liam. Liam?"

"What?" Liam was startled out of his thoughts by Louis' pressing voice. 

"Look at him, he's pining," Louis muttered through gritted teeth at Niall. "And you know why, don't you, you twat, it's because of Zayn, and-"

"I'm not the only one pining, and stop calling it that," Liam interrupted Louis determinedly. "Look, we all miss him, and no, shut up," he pointed at Louis who looked far too keen to interject. "We all miss him, there's no denying that. And yeah, it's been a while, but maybe it would be good for all of us to get together for a bit. A proper chat. Just the five of us. Things can't go on being strange forever and we aren't strangers. Louis." 

"Mhmpf." 

"Listen to him, Louis," Niall added. "You can't be mad at him forever. And Liam has even more right to be upset than you do, and he's handling it like a proper adult, so why don't you take a hint from him."

"No, stop, that's not-" Liam protested, but Niall shushed him immediately. 

"Liam, yes, you do. In fact it would probably be best if we gave you two some alone time, when he does come-"

"IF. If he comes."

"No, Louis, WHEN he comes."

"Guys, stop, just-"

"What're you dicks shouting about, I was in the middle of a nice fuckin dream," Harry drawls from the kitchen doorway, standing in a pair of boxer briefs with his hair suspended in a mountainous bird's nest above his head. 

"Zayn's coming," Niall jumped in quickly as Louis glowered and stomped off into bathroom. 

Harry's eyes trailed Louis as he said, "Oh, that'll be good, then, when'll he be here?"

"Tomorrow," Niall replied, and Liam's vision went blank as Louis screamed from the bathroom,

"BLOODY TOMORROW, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, NIALL, YOU JUST COULDN'T GIVE A MAN A WARNING, COULD YOU?"

Heart pounding, Liam sunk down in front of the window. Harry came up behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder. 

"You okay, Li?"

"Yeah," he replied slowly. "I'll be fine."

Eyes tracing the ocean line, Liam tried to find the conviction to believe his own words. 

~~

Tour, March 2015

 

Like the Japanese cat dolls whose heads bobbed back and forth endlessly, Liam had trained himself to constantly field any questions regarding Zayn leaving the band, be it from reporters, fans or Zayn himself. He just couldn’t confront the idea of a lack of Zayn. It was just improbable. It defied his own life because life was life with Zayn. And Liam knew how corny it sounded in his head but it was the truth. Every other time that they had had a break and separated, it had been with a set deadline; three weeks break, then back together on the road. Two days off, then regroup at the tour bus. But now, it was good-bye Zayn, good luck out there with your own life, separate from the rest, and when would they see each other again? None of them could say. 

They were staying in a rented apartment somewhere in the midst of Hong Kong, just the five of them, for the last few days before Zayn would take off to New York. Liam’s stomach had been in knots for hours even though they had just all been hanging as usual. If anything, everyone seemed happier than normal - Liam could tell that Louis was letting go of the anger that had plagued him for the benefit of everyone else, and he and Zayn had spent a lot of time together smoking in the big bedroom where they had all ended up dragging their mattresses. In fact it seemed like Zayn had been making an effort to spend time alone with each of them except Liam, a thought that only made the coils in his stomach harden into steel cables. 

Not that Liam was jealous. After all they had been through, both as a band and just him and Zayn, it was impossible for any of them to be jealous of anyone else. He was mainly sad, but also confused, because - well, because of a hundred reasons. 

Sitting alone in the backyard of the very nice apartment, Liam kicked his shoes off and pulled a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his flannel. Actually it was Zayn’s flannel, and the cigarettes were his, too, Liam had taken it without even realizing. Same way he had started smoking - without really realizing. It just happened. 

He lit up the cigarette and exhaled long. Thinking. He closed his eyes and felt the cool fall air press around him, gently still, not yet the frigid fingers of winter that would soon force him indoors. Liam pictured the five of them in a sphere, a ball rolling down a steep hill, and all of them inside jumbled up and falling all over one another. Because that was more or less how the last five years had gone, each of them falling in love with the other four in one way or another, and rather than splitting them into parts it had only made the sphere more sturdy as it bounced and ricocheted down uncharted paths. 

Harry and Louis had been the first ones to fuck, within six months. Then Harry snogged Niall, then Zayn, then finally Liam, until all of a sudden physical boundaries weren’t a thing anymore. The years had started to roll out under their feet as Harry fucked Louis, Louis fucked Harry, and one night Zayn fucked both of them. With a little coaxing Niall fucked Harry, who sucked his dick and eventually, with much coaxing, fucked him, and to everyone’s surprise Niall took dick like he was born to. 

It wasn’t a game of breaking hearts, it wasn’t like people were getting their feelings hurt. From the outside Liam could imagine it might seem strange for five boys to be so into each other, but it just was what it was. They loved each other. With the five of them it was each to their own interests. Funnily enough Liam was the last one to fuck/get fucked, and both of those things happened on the same night. They had been in Tokyo hyped up on molly and Louis had pulled Liam into a neon-red room somewhere in the thicket of the city and it had felt so, so good to let Louis fuck him against the plaster wall and again on the floor.

Later that same night Liam had wandered into another room in another part of the city, or maybe it had only been a few floors up - this room was neon-blue, and occupied by Zayn, sitting cross-legged in the corner beside a white marble sculpture of an Italian greyhound, smoking a spliff. 

~~

Tokyo, 2012

 

“Hey!” Liam cried, half-stumbling into the room, molly and aftersex still coursing like warm gold through his veins. Zayn looked up and grinned widely. 

“Leeeyum, come join me, why dontcha?” 

Liam shut the door being him and waded through the deep blue light to where Zayn sat next to the dog, wearing black jeans and a black hoodie that said something in Chinese across the front.

“Zayn,” Liam hummed, dropping down beside him and nuzzling his head into Zayn’s lap as he stretched out across the floor. 

“How’s it going, mate? You feel good?”

“Yeah, man it’s wild, innit, but Zayn, I’ve gotta tell you something,” Liam said, still smiling up at Zayn’s sharp profile, made softer by the deep blue. 

“And what’s that, babe?” Smoke crept out of the sides of his mouth when he spoke, and fuck’s sake he looked good even from Liam’s upward angle, too good to be true, everything was too good for any of it to be true, really.

“Louis boned me,” Liam sighed in content. He felt Zayn stiffen against him, felt the sinewy muscles of his narrow thighs tense suddenly. He heard the soft exhale, a string of ‘fuck, fuck’ breathed out above him. 

“Zayn?”

Liam sat up, head spinning from the rush of movement. He scooted his arse so that he was seated next to Zayn. Zayn wordlessly passed him the spliff, shaking his head in apparent disbelief. Liam took the spliff and brought it carefully to the corner of his mouth, breathed in the thick sticky smoke, tried not to cough. He was aware of Zayn’s eyes on him as he let the smoke drift out of his mouth. He hit the spliff once more and felt a calmness grow like a warm hole in the center of his chest, dimming down some of the molly, melting it into something quieter and sweeter. 

“So how was it, then?” Zayn asked abruptly, voice somewhat hoarse. “How was it, getting fucked by Louis?”

Liam turned his head to see Zayn’s eyes dark as hell, boring into his skull. His cheeks, smooth still. He could feel the feelings that Zayn felt saying those words, as though by saying them Zayn had pushed his emotions out into the space between them for Liam to examine, smell, touch. Taste. 

“It was amazing,” Liam breathed, suddenly afraid to talk in anything above a whisper for fear that Zayn might evaporate into blue fog and drift apart in front of him. 

“Shit,” Zayn muttered, taking the spliff back from where it had sat untouched in Liam’s big fingers for a minute. 

“Zayn.” 

Zayn took a hit and held the smoke in his lungs for what felt like an eternity, staring straight ahead, looking lost.

“Zayn,”

He exhaled, shrouding himself in a cloud of smoke. When he reappeared, Liam brought a hand up to Zayn’s stubbled cheek and stroked his upper lip with the pad of his thumb. Zayn froze under his touch and suddenly Liam’s heartbeat picked up like a hummingbird’s incessant wings beating. Without pausing to think about anything Liam turned Zayn’s face toward his own, and leaned forward and brought his lips to Zayn’s.

There was a dim roaring in Liam’s head, a static buzz that intensified as Zayn flicked the spliff across the room and swung one leg over Liam’s body and licked the seam of Liam’s mouth open with his tongue and kissed him deeply. It enveloped his brain until Liam was aware only of the noises coming from Zayn as Liam slid his hands under Zayn’s shirt and dipped his fingers into the back seam of his pants. 

They broke the kiss long enough for Zayn to pull off his sweatshirt, and then Liam’s shirt. There was a pause, during which they just stopped to stare at each other. Strangely enough, Liam didn’t feel any different, like he had imagined he would so many times while playing out this exact scenario in his head. But being like this - shirtless Zayn straddling him, pushing their stiff cocks together through their jeans, running his fingers up and down Liam’s arms and staring at him with those big brown eyes pupils blown wide with lust and molly - it felt right. Just right. 

They had seen each others’ dicks before, but never had Liam seen Zayn’s in blue, hard and thick, coupled with Zayn’s small huff as Liam pushed him onto his back and went down on him. He hadn’t sucked a lot of dick in his short lifetime, but Liam had to admit that he really liked it. And even more so, he found himself quickly liking the moans that fell from Zayn’s mouth as his tongue licked a stripe along the underside of Zayn’s cock. Good god in heaven, lord almighty, Liam must have died and ascended to get to here. 

“Liam, stop,” Zayn panted, hand cupping Liam’s cheek and pulling him up. “Can’t - can’t last with you doing - that -“

Liam silenced him with a kiss and gasped into Zayn’s mouth as he one-handedly unzipped Liam’s fly and pulled his dick out of his still-moist briefs.

“Li- I want you to fuck me,” Zayn breathed heavily between them. 

“Jesus, Zayn, I haven’t got a - fuck - condom,” Liam rasped, voice jumping as Zayn squeezed him a little more tightly. But he was never one to say no to Zayn and suddenly there was nothing in the world Liam wanted more than to fuck him. 

“I don’t care,” Zayn stuttered, and looked into Liam’s eyes and smiled and Liam swore he could feel any semblance of control blown to dust by that messy-haired wide-eyed smile. 

His hours in the gym must have all been put in for this very moment, when Liam was able to easily flip Zayn off of him and spread him across the wooden floor. Of course Liam had fucked girls before, several of them, but nothing could have prepared him for how he would feel watching Zayn’s face as Liam slicked up his fingers and opened Zayn up beneath him. How Zayn spit into his hand and used it to slick up Liam’s cock, how Zayn’s eyes fluttered shut as Liam pushed into him slowly, only to open a half second later to stare at him in apparent wonder. 

The sudden rush of desire and protectiveness; desire to make Zayn feel good, and to protect him from everyone else in the world. And when Liam came inside of him, and when Zayn came across both of their stomachs, how looking into Zayn’s eyes felt like something he would never grow tired of. 

Those eyes. So big and brown, Liam could feel himself being swallowed in their depths. 

~~

Tour, March 2015

 

Liam hadn’t realized, then, that Zayn had never let anyone fuck him before. That Liam was the first. That Zayn had been waiting for that moment even longer than Liam had. 

It had been building up between them since - well, since a long time ago, Liam thought, thinking back on all the times he’d looked up to see Zayn’s eyes already boring into him, all the touches and glances on stage, and off as well. He should have realized earlier, Liam thought, but it all happened so fast…

The cigarette burned his fingertip suddenly, jerking Liam back into the present. He hastily dropped it and stubbed it out into the ground, shaking his head. He was about to get up and head back inside when the door behind him opened, and Zayn came out. He sat down beside Liam on the ornate metal bench that was decorated with quilts and pillows, taking one of the quilts and shaking it out over their legs. 

He looked exhausted, Liam observed, staring at the blue bags beneath his eyes that looked like bruises. Though Liam knew all about Zayn’s bruises and there were definitely many on his body that were out of sight at the moment. 

“Didn’t realize you had my flannel,” Zayn said, glancing sideways at Liam, a small smile playing across his lips. “Although I suppose it’s just as much yours.”

Liam shrugged, reaching back into the pocket for a cigarette for Zayn. On second thought he pulled out two and passed one to Zayn. He lit up his own, then leaned in towards Zayn and inhaled as Zayn pressed the tip of his cigarette to Liam’s lit one. They pulled back and exhaled in unison, Zayn’s practiced lungs producing nearly twice as much smoke compared to Liam’s cleaner set. 

“Remember how you always used to tell me that I’d die young because of these?” Zayn said, still smiling. “Back at the judge’s house. And now look at you, succumbed.” He chuckles a trail of smokey clouds. 

“Judge’s house was a long time ago,” Liam replied, keeping his gaze steadily ahead. He could feel Zayn’s gaze on him but couldn’t bring himself to meet it. After a moment of silence, Zayn sighed.

“Yeah, s’pose it was.” 

They were quiet again for a few minutes, each lost in their own thoughts. Liam’s returned to that night in Tokyo, and how after he had come inside of Zayn, Zayn had said to him, ‘I want to keep doing that. With you.’

It was as close as they had ever come to making anything official, though nothing ever really was official between them. It was just a thing in the band, that from then on out it was LiamAndZayn, that they would still fool around with the other boys but the sex between the two of them was more sacred.

“What’re you thinking about?” Zayn broke the silence, reaching over to grab the cigarettes out of Liam’s pocket. His hand lingered a second longer than was necessary, fingertips running along the edge of the shirt’s collar. 

“Tokyo,” Liam said unabashedly. 

“Mmm. I think about it quite often as well.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Zayn twisted onto the bench so that he was sitting cross-legged facing Liam. “I dream about it sometimes. The blue. Like, blue is the warmest color, you know, the film. I think it is the warmest color. Or, I dunno, has the warmest memories.”

Hearing Zayn say things like that made Liam’s heart cave in on itself. Suddenly the reality that Zayn wouldn’t be with him tomorrow smacked him across the face. He felt his upper lip tremble, and forced himself to be still.

Zayn didn’t seem to notice and kept talking. “And like, the whole club scene in Tokyo, that was just mad. Like, I doubt even New York will be able to top it. Although the people in New York, I mean shit, like, you remember last time we were there, yeah? And the girls, that was some otherworldly shit. The blokes too, I reckon would be-“

“You what?” 

Liam sat up all of a sudden and faced Zayn, trembling. “Reckon you’ll find yourself a nice American boy to fuck since I won’t be there to do it, then?”

“Liam, what-“ Zayn started, but Liam was suddenly too angry to listen to another word. 

“Weeks, no, longer than that, you’ve been sad. Or at least not happy. I get that. You need a fresh start. New you. And yeah, that’s all very fucking brilliant, Zayn, but did you ever pause and think about the lads? About - about me?”

“Wait, Li, what are you saying?” Zayn looked deeply concerned now.

“Well, I dunno, maybe just that it would be nice to hear some fucking confirmation from you that you’ll miss me even just a little bit,” Liam huffed, face turning red from a mixture of anger and embarrassment. 

“Liam, you know that I’ll miss you, is that what this is about? Wait, are you - you’re jealous.” Zayn said with a tone of realization. 

“Yeah, yeah, I am fucking jealous, so sue me. You’ll be off overseas probably screwing some kid in a two hundred dollar white tee-shirt and I’ll be back here wanking off to fucking memories and you’ll pretty soon forget all about-“

“Liam, stop,” Zayn warned, but he couldn’t, the total weight of the past few weeks had come crashing down on Liam’s shoulders like a twenty foot wave and he had forgotten how to swim and all he knew was that he loved Zayn and Zayn was leaving him.

“No, Zayn, you stop, you - you should have stopped a long time ago, we both knew that this - this thing was more than just sex-“ 

He was standing now in his rage, and Zayn jumped up to meet him.

“That was before! God dammit Liam, yeah, it was more than just sex but things are changing now! You’re changing, I’m changing, life is changing, and-“

“And what? You’re just gonna fly off now and put it all of it behind you like it never happened, is that it?”

“Well, no, I-“

“Just forget about all those times I fucked you till you were begging for it? Till you were gagging on my cock?”

Liam knew he had hit a nerve when Zayn’s face flushed a deep pink.

“Shut up.”

“Why? It’s the truth. Or did you already erase those memories from your almighty brain?”

“Fuck you, Liam.”

“No, Zayn, fuck you. You can try to hide behind that whole ‘quiet’ facade but it won’t work on me. You can’t deny this. You can’t deny -“

“I’m not trying to deny it, I’m just saying that - what, did you honestly expect that this would last forever? That we could just keep screwing each other until the end of time with no consequences? Well, hate to break it to you, Li, but that’s not how shit works, and-“

Liam stepped forward, grabbed Zayn by the front of his shirt, and shoved him into the wall of the house behind him. Zayn gasped but it barely left his mouth before Liam was on him, biting Zayn’s lip, shoving his tongue down Zayn’s throat, left thigh working Zayn’s legs apart until Zayn was grinding himself down on Liam. Zayn was gasping in his ear, moaning, and the hole in Liam’s chest expanded so powerfully he felt weak at the knees. 

It lasted all of ten seconds before Zayn managed to work his hands to Liam’s chest and shove him off. Liam stumbled back and nearly fell. 

They stared at each other from the distance of a few feet, breathing heavily. Zayn’s eyes were red and his hair was a disheveled mess. Liam knew he probably didn’t look much better. 

“This has to stop, Liam,” Zayn breathed after a few moments, voice cracking. “We aren’t kids anymore. We can’t keep pretending that it would ever work out long-term.”

Liam didn’t have to ask him if he meant One Direction or the two of them. He felt the tears, hot and wet, stinging his eyes. He tried to blink them back but a few stray ones escaped the clutches of his lashes and dripped down his cheeks like acid. His ears burned. 

“Li, we were never together, like. Dating. That was never part of the plan. It couldn’t have been. And-“ 

Zayn’s voice cracked and Liam looked up to see, incredulously, that Zayn’s eyes too were watering. “And that’s why I’m leaving. Because I want to live my life. Make my own choices. Fuck who I want, and fuck all if the world knows.”

That’s what I want, too, Liam wanted to say. His entire being ached with the bone-deep need to be close to Zayn, but he was rooted to the spot, unable to move. They stared at each other like two predators each on the verge of giving up, but both trying to get in one last swipe at the other before parting in mutual defeat. Zayn’s expression was unreadable and Liam suddenly found the bare patch of brick wall behind his head a better target to stare at. 

“Good for you, then,” he heard himself say in a strange, dull voice. “I’ll look for that in the papers. ‘Zayn Malik fucks who he wants. Zayn Malik with a different boy or girl coming out of his apartment every other night.’ Sounds fuckin brilliant.”

“Liam.”

He met Zayn’s gaze. The tears were gone, any emotion that might have showed on his face was gone. Zayn’s eyes were pure steel, boring through him like lasers. 

“Fuck you.” 

Zayn turned and walked back inside, slamming the door behind him 

~~

LA, November 2015

 

That had been the last time they had spoken. The boys had driven Zayn to the airport the next morning but Liam had sat in the back of the car and didn’t say a word during the entire drive. The atmosphere had been tense, but Niall and Harry were keeping conversation going. When they arrived at the airport, Zayn had hugged and kissed each of the boys goodbye in turn, and when he got to Liam, had given him a quick cursory one-armed hug without meeting his eyes. And after that, they watched him get on the private jet and take off into the great grey sky. 

Watching the plane disappear into a tiny dot in the sky, Liam felt torn between a deep-rooted anger and an even deeper sadness, that battled within his chest.

Zayn had texted and called him a total of twenty three times throughout the course of a month, but Liam hadn’t been able to find it in his heart to reply to any of them. He felt betrayed, or whatever was supposed to come next, he didn’t know. 

The mansion they had rented out for the past few weeks was enormous. They had all taken a few weeks off following the end of the tour in October, and re-grouped in LA after Thanksgiving for some much-needed mate time. They had been there for almost a week, and though he missed his family, Liam had to admit to himself that nothing really grounded him or made him feel as safe as spending time with his boys, for a purpose other than touring. 

Liam had retreated to the roof for the past couple of hours to think things over. The mansion was at the top of the Beverly Hill, or whatever it was called, either way, the rooftop was out of anyone’s line of sight so Liam didn’t have to worry about being papped as he moped around in his briefs, chaining cigarettes and pulling at a handle of Jäger, chasing it down with some really fucking nice local beer Harry had brought home the other day. 

Liam sprawled across one of the lounge chairs, basking in the warm LA winter sun, as he scrolled through his phone, re-reading, for the hundredth time, the messages he’d received from Zayn. 

The first one had come three days after Zayn’s departure. 

March 28th, 8:09 pm: Li, I just wanted to say, I’m sorry for the way we left things. Can I call you sometime this week, have a chat? xx Z 

April 3rd, 4:23 am: Look I’m sorry ok. Please say something. 

April 3rd, 6:12 am: Fine, fuck it all then 

April 3rd, 2:19 pm: Didn't mean that. Liam please tell me you’re alive at least i’m getting worried. xx Z 

April 4th, 10:10 pm: Just got off Skype with Haz. He says you’re alive. For fucks sake just message me.

April 12th, 12:56 am: Fine then i can take a hint. fuck this waiting around shit liam you know i love you more than fuck ok just man up and respond to me you prick 

(Liam was fairly positive Zayn had been flat out drunk when he wrote that one) 

April 25th, 3:00 pm: Merry xmas Li miss you. love you. xx Z

Merry xmas? How fucking high was he? 

After that Liam had blocked Zayn’s number, unable to, well, deal with any more of it, for lack of a better word. He had gotten the occasional update from Harry as to what Zayn was doing, but Liam avoided the tabloids and the news (all of them did, to be honest) so he really had little clue about Zayn’s life after…after. It had been hard for all of them to stay in touch with Zayn. They had gone from five to four and the shift had been massive to cope with, and it wasn’t just having to adjust to singing slightly different parts in each song now. 

It was like adjusting to life without a vital limb, an arm or a leg…Liam and Harry and Niall and Louis were now all that comprised their core, and the core had been shaken thoroughly. What could any of them say to Zayn while he was away in New York or LA or London, and they were still out there doing the same routine each night in a different city? The distance between them had expanded into a vast rift that didn’t have an easy way out. With Zayn making some remark about One Direction in every other article he was featured in, and with his and Louis’s stupid Twitter fight, and other inane shit that somehow added up over the weeks as the tour stretched out…it had been an unspoken agreement between the four of them that contact with Zayn just wasn’t a thing. They couldn’t meet in the middle. They weren’t able to. 

At least, not yet. 

After the tour finally, finally ended and they were able to go home, Liam sensed a change in all of them. A subtle shift, but it was there. On FaceTime with Harry, he’d mentioned Zayn and it hadn’t caused them both to pause for a noticeable fraction of a second. When Liam chatted with Niall and Niall had sent him a photoshopped picture of Zayn getting a lapdance from Obama, it hadn’t caused Liam to spiral into a two-day depression like it would have weeks earlier. Even Louis had casually slipped Zayn’s name into a conversation and the knot in Liam’s stomach hadn’t tightened. 

Even so, while they had been holed up in the mansion, Liam could tell that the other three were walking on invisible eggshells around him. He wondered if it was that obvious to anyone who was around him that he missed Zayn so very deep down inside of him. 

Sighing, Liam stood up and walked over to the jacuzzi, whose bubbles were on full blast 24/7. Placing his drinks and cigarettes on the ground, he slipped into the water and allowed himself to drift beneath the bubbling surface. 

His mind was immediately yanked back to a time not so long ago, him and Zayn in the bathtub in Toronto. The tub had been enormous, big enough for all five of them, but the rest of the boys had gone out for the night so it had just been the two of them. Zayn had fucked him against the side of the tub, the hot water dulling the usual burn and stretch that had become so familiar to Liam throughout the years. The memory reverberated through his body as his head began to spin with the heat and lack of oxygen. 

Liam surfaced, spluttering, to see Niall clambering through the trapdoor and out onto the roof, small cloth bag in one hand. Liam grinned, and lifted himself out to the edge of the tub with his forearms. 

“All right?” Niall called, ambling over. 

“Yeah,” Liam replied, shaking his head free of the droplets. “I see you came prepared,” he said, eyeing the bag. 

“Course. Figured you could use some, er, peace of mind.” 

Liam brushed the comment aside and watched as Niall unzipped the bag and pulled out a prescription bottle of medical weed, courtesy of the LA Green Cross. Niall slid the sharp edge of his pocketknife along the body of a cigarillo, emptying out the tobacco, as Liam popped open the prescription bottle and picked out two healthy-sized nugs that he proceeded to grind in Louis’s two-hundred dollar silver grinder. 

“Can’t believe how much money he spent on that,” Niall muttered under his breath as Liam unscrewed the grinder and tapped out the finely ground weed into the bare blunt. He chuckled.

“Coming from you, mate, you use it more than he does.”

“True.”

Zayn was the best at rolling out of all of them, but Niall was a close second, Liam thought as he watched Niall concentratedly roll a thick and tight blunt, licking the edge with the pink tip of his tongue and smooth it down. He placed it between his lips and lit it, exhaling thick grey smoke into Liam’s face. He batted it away with his hands, laughing. 

After a few hits Niall passed Liam the blunt and reached for his half-empty beer. 

“Trade,” he murmured, giggling. 

He felt it when the weed entered his bloodstream and travel up to his head, gluing together his synapses, making the world brighter, sounds rounder. Niall’s laughter beside him sounded like bubbles popping. 

“Zayn say what time he’s coming tomorrow?” Liam asked, his voice sounding separate from his body and brain. Beside him Niall stirred, rolling over onto his side to stare at Liam with those big blue eyes. Liam watched his mouth open and heard sound come out of it, but couldn’t flatten the sound into a word. A while later, what felt like an hour but was probably only ten or so seconds, Niall spoke again.

“So what exactly, er, went down with you two? Y’know, back in Hong Kong?” 

Liam lay down on his back and closed his eyes, feeling the sun seep beneath his skin, as he searched for the right words. He pictured Zayn’s face the last time he’d seen it properly, eyebrows knit together in anger, eyes betraying a deeper hurt that Liam hadn’t been able to see at the time through his own haze of emotions. It had been so long ago…seven, no, eight months…the sharp sting of it had faded into a continuous throb of slight pain that Liam barely noticed anymore, unless he forced himself to tune into it. Or unless he scrolled through his folder titled ‘arsetwat’ in his Photos (mainly selfies of the two of them, interspersed with post-coital pictures of Zayn’s sweaty skin, his sharp cheekbones in the early morning, that Liam had taken against Zayn’s will). 

“I got jealous,” Liam replied without thinking. “I was jealous that he was leaving, that he would find someone else. I was scared…” he trailed off, lost momentarily in the memory of Zayn stomping into the house, slamming the door on Liam who still stood there in Zayn’s flannel, Zayn’s dying cigarette dangling forgotten between his fingertips. “I still am scared, to be honest,” Liam heard himself say, his voice sounding as if it were coming from a different body. “I’m scared to see him. To see if he’s changed.” 

Liam opened his eyes slowly, blinking, to see Niall staring at him again. Niall sighed, and then suddenly he was on top of him, running his fingers up Liam’s arms. 

“Oh Liam,” Niall muttered, voice somewhat sad but also frustrated. “You have no idea, do you,”

“About what,” he hummed, content under Niall’s ministrations. At that moment the roof door exploded open, and Louis shimmied out, pausing to pull up a cooler that Harry pushed out to him before climbing out after Louis’s ass had moved a safe distance away. 

“Lads,” Harry announced, tossing them all fresh beers, and the rest of Niall’s sentence was thrown to the light salty breeze that seemed to always be there. 

“Anyone fancy a wee drink?” Louis asked, pulling a fresh handle of Hennessy from the cooler. 

“I would fancy a wee drink,” Niall replied, and, pausing to tickle Liam beneath him, added, “Liam fancies one as well.” 

And so the rest of the day passed in a blur of more joints, lukewarm beers, and swigs of Hennessy. The sun passed above the four of them and sunk towards the flat horizon as Liam felt himself blend into the rooftop, into the mindless conversation, into the warm stone beneath him. He slipped in and out of consciousness until the sun had set and it became cool again, verging on cold; he slid into the hot tub beside Harry, who offered him a half-smoked spliff that Liam accepted. He felt strangely detached from reality, a combination of the weed and alcohol and naps, but also as though he had already died and was merely floating above his own body, watching the world around him. 

He must have passed out because when he came to, it was pitch black outside. Liam was shivering, lying on his side on the roof wearing only his wet shorts that were plastered to his goosebumpy skin. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, wincing at the soreness that lying on the hard rooftop had incited in his back. He heard voices nearby; turning, he saw Harry and Niall still in the hot tub, passing what must have been the tenth joint of the night between them.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Harry called as Liam crawled over to them sliding into the tub and reveling in the encasing warmth of the water. “I should probably tell you that I’ve pissed in here at least twice,” Harry added, giggling. 

“Harry!” Niall reprimanded, looking shocked. “That’s no way to treat your mates. Especially ones who share their weed with you,” he added, scandalized. Liam had to laugh at them before seizing the joint from between Harry’s spidery fingers.

“Have a nice kip?” Harry asked, prodding Liam’s shoulder with a finger. 

“Not really, back’s all fucked now…what time’s it anyway?” Liam asked, taking a deep hit and holding the thick smoke in his lungs as he waited for Harry to rummage blindly around the ground for his phone. 

“It is…just past three. Lads, what say we make it to four-twenty?” Harry giggled again, tiny peals of laughter that seemed to drift visibly up into the air, mingling with the weed smoke and the tendrils of evaporation from the hot tub. “Louis’s in bed, by the way,” he added, seeing Liam open his mouth. “Was tired. Said he needed a proper night’s rest to prepare himself for tomorrow.”

Liam nodded silently, exhaling a thin plume of smoke into the indigo sky.

“Aye, four twenty,” Niall agreed belatedly, reaching for the joint. Liam passed it to him, ashing it on the side of the pool adeptly. 

“Remember when Liam used to not smoke?” Harry said, not really asking. “I remember those days. You were so innocent, Liam, what happened?” he laughed, crawling closer to where Liam sat and leaning his curly head on Liam’s shoulder. 

Zayn, Liam wanted to say, suddenly gripped by the realization that Zayn would be there in mere hours. Hours ago it hadn’t even seemed real. 

“Aw yeah…guess it did, didn’t it?” Harry drawled, nuzzling Liam’s shoulder fondly with his head, as Liam realized a beat too late that he had answered out loud. Fucking weed, honestly. 

“Yeah, like…” he trailed off, unsure of what to say. Niall had inched himself closer as well, now sitting on Liam’s other side, and the nervous knot in his stomach loosened slightly as he felt himself barricaded by his mates. Safe. 

“You don’t have to talk about it, like,” Harry began, finger now tracing the lines of Liam’s arm where it had snaked its way around Harry’s leaning form. 

“Yeah, mate, we get it. It’s hard, this shit. It’s never easy,” Niall said from his other side. “Also, here, reckon it’s got two hits left,” as he passed Liam the stubby roach.

Liam killed the joint, lungs burning richly; he stubbed it out, flicked the roach away, and began to talk. The words came easily, all of a sudden, and he realized that they had always been inside of him, he just hadn’t been able to articulate them. But here, on the rooftop tub with two of his best mates, a healthy amount of weed soothing the ache in his temples - and in his heart, he could admit - it was easy to say the things he’d kept silent within him for so long.

“Zayn and I…it’s confusing now, innit? I mean, I haven’t talked to him since our row back in London before he left and that feels like ages ago…and with the tour and all, I never had a chance to properly think about it…about everything…” he sighed deeply, sinking deeper into the tub. Harry’s head sunk with him. “And there was so much to think about. Essentially everything. Every part of our relationship, starting from judge’s house…pretty much all I did while I was at home, mum was worried sick that I was falling into depression cuz all I did was wander round the house with this weird look on my face…anyway. I guess I realized that, like, at this point, I was mainly jealous of the fact that he wasn’t ours anymore. Our boy. Now he’s out there in the world…after everything we did together, and not just the two of us but all five of us…it doesn’t feel right. And I miss him.”

Saying it out loud made Liam’s heart clench on itself. He said it again. “I miss him.”

He heard a sniffle on his shoulder and looked down to see a single tear running down Harry’s cheek. It disappeared into the hot tub. 

“Babe,” Niall started, reaching across Liam to rub Harry’s head soothingly with one hand. Liam joined him. Harry slowly lifted his head and wiped his eyes absently, staring at Liam and Niall unblinkingly. 

“I miss Zayn too,” he whispered, a few more tears escaping the clutches of his long eyelashes and running shamelessly down his cheeks. “I miss how things used to be. I miss touring, even the shit interviews and stuff…I miss all of us on stage together.”

“Me too,” Niall said softly, drifting from Liam’s side to Harry’s so that Harry now sat between them. He tilted Harry’s face up to his and kissed him gently. Harry sniffled again but shifted himself so that he was straddling Niall in the water. They kissed more deeply and when they broke apart, Liam was surprised to see that Niall’s eyes were wet as well. 

“We were the team,” he muttered gravely, dragging his fingers through Harry’s wet hair. “Liam, mate, Zayn made me swear on my grave not to tell you or anyone else this, but I caught him wanking to a picture of you while we were recording What Makes You Beautiful. It was always you, Liam. He told me, about a year later, like, must have been right before you two finally snogged or whatever weird sexual stuff happened back in Tokyo. He told me that he didn’t think he was good enough for you and how you deserved someone better.” 

He paused before adding, “And then, after the day that he told us about how he was leaving permanently, he said it to me again, how you deserve someone who won’t leave you.” 

Niall fell quiet, letting his words absorb into Liam’s psyche. He felt numb, not just from the weed, but from what Niall had said. The pain that had been crouching in a corner of himself for so long stretched its limbs and began to crawl into his stomach, up his throat, clamping his windpipe so hard that tears gathered in his eyes and then without warning Liam was crying. Silent tears slid down his cheeks like bland pearls on a string, dropping into the tub. His shoulders shook and he squeezed his eyes shut tightly, willing himself to stop and settle.

A pair of hands cupped his face, a thumb along his upper lip. Liam blinked his eyes open to find himself staring into Harry’s wide brown ones, the whites almost pure red. Harry kissed him, silencing the sobs that were threatening to burst from inside Liam’s chest. Harry’s tongue dipped into his mouth, warm and soft. Liam kissed him back, wrapping his hands around Harry’s bare back and drawing him close, pushing out the water between them. He smiled as he remembered the time that Harry and Zayn had come back drunk as hell from a night out - god, where had they been? Amsterdam? Copenhagen? - and had taken turns fucking him in the shower while Louis had slept on unassumingly a few feet away. He pulled away from Harry to repeat the memory. 

“Aw, yeah,” Harry laughed, sliding over and pulling Niall over so that the two of them were clustered over Liam’s lap, a true triangle. “That was fun.”

“Yeah, except for when Paul texted me at five that morning asking me to knock on your door and tell you to keep it down. And I had been enjoying a peaceful rest alone in the bus,” Niall huffed, but he was smiling. Harry tickled his chin fondly and Liam felt his tears receding, felt the pain withdrawing its sharp scales for the time being.

“Lads, shall we move this nostalgic cryfest indoors? I’m turning into an actual prune,” Niall whined under Harry’s ministrations. 

“Good move,” Harry agreed, and they helped each other out of the tub. Niall’s skin had indeed turned a disturbing texture of wrinkled. 

“You look like an old man,” Liam commented, voice slightly raw, as they shimmied down the trapdoor and into the house. 

“Sod off, you’re not much better,” Niall snorted, shoving Liam into the master bedroom where Louis’s soft snores could be heard. “Shhhh,” he whispered exaggeratedly, causing Harry to burst into another fit of giggles. 

Liam directed them into the bathroom adjoining the bedroom, a beauty of marble and glass. “I’m gonna shower,” he announced, stripping off his shorts and stepping into the unnecessarily large glass cubicle that contained a showerhead with over a dozen different settings. 

“Me too,” Harry agreed, following suit. “Nialler? You coming?”

Niall shook his head, reaching for a towel from the sink. “I’ve had enough water for one night. I’ll go roll us a proper four twenty spliff.” He shucked his pants into the bathtub in the corner of the bathroom, wrapped the towel around his narrow waist, and tiptoed back into the bedroom, leaving Harry and Liam in the shower that could have easily hosted ten men their size. 

They took turns scrubbing each other over with some lavender-smelling soap, Liam running his hands gently through the slopes of Harry’s body, kneeling to lather his long skinny legs each in turn. Harry’s eyes were closed, water dripping down his face, down his neck. Without opening them he placed a hand on Liam’s head and held it there for a minute, Liam’s face pressed against his stomach, both of them breathing quietly for a moment. 

“We’re here for you, y’know, no matter what happens tomorrow,” Harry said quietly, barely audible over the splat of water on the marble tiles. Liam nodded against his stomach in affirmation. 

They broke apart eventually, turned off the shower, and robed themselves. Liam opened the bathroom door cautiously, and then laughed, opening it wider. On the bed, Niall looked as though he had taken two steps and collapsed on top of Louis. The towel was on the floor, and one of Niall’s legs was sprawled across Louis’s torso. Both snored contentedly. 

“Well, there goes our four twenty spliff,” Harry sighed, hooking his chin over Liam’s shoulder and pushing him out. “Let’s go out into the kitchen, m’hungry.” 

While Harry busied himself making a sandwich, Liam padded down the hallway and into one of the other bedrooms where he had slept for the past few nights. This one had floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, with views of the San Fernando Valley engulfing him. He slipped out of his bathrobe and grabbed a pair of leprechaun boxers from the floor, unsure of whose they were. Probably Niall’s. He swiped his cigarettes from the table next to the low, large bed and pushed open one of the glass doors that led to a small outdoor balcony. Liam lit up a cigarette and inhaled thoughtfully, slightly less stoned now than he had been earlier. 

He tried to picture Zayn beside him, tried to picture him walking through the front door. What would he say to Liam? What would Liam say to him? What could he even say, after months of essentially no contact, to the boy he had loved for so long, who had essentially disappeared from their lives? He wasn’t sure. 

Harry joined him on the balcony a few minutes later, as Liam flicked the filter off the edge and into the blackness below them. He was chewing on an impressively thick sandwich in one hand, a tall glass of chocolate milk in the other. 

“All right?” he asked thickly, sidling up beside Liam and setting his milk on the ground before swallowing loudly. Harry’s free hand came to rest at the small of Liam’s back, and he was grateful for the contact. 

“Yeah, m’good. I think. Not sure.”

They stood in silence, apart from the sound of Harry’s chewing, until the sandwich was gone. Harry coughed, picked up his milk, and drained it. He clapped Liam on the shoulder, turned, and went back into the bedroom. 

“M’sleeping here again,” he called from inside, apparently not expecting an answer. Liam heard the sound of Harry flopping onto the bed, heard the rustle of the covers, and a minute later, the deep breathing of a Harry sound asleep. He sighed.

Liam had felt exhausted while they had been in the shower, but now his mind was spinning relentlessly. He slid down the glass door, sat cross legged on the balcony, and chain smoked until his cigarettes were gone. Fucking Marlboro Golds. Fucking Zayn, for introducing him to this sin. He remembered the first time he had touched a cigarette. It had been after one of their shows during the first tour, all of them giddy with the excitement of it all. They were getting ready to pile into the bus and Zayn and Liam had been in the middle of an animated conversation. Liam was about to get on when he noticed Zayn still standing beside the bus, hunting around for his cigarettes in his pocket. Liam had stayed with him, had almost said no when Zayn offered him one with a small smile, but he had never been one for saying no to Zayn. 

He had coughed a lot, blushed deeply when Zayn ran a finger down his cheek and said, “No worries, yeah? It takes some getting used to.”

Sighing, Liam checked his phone; it was four twenty exactly. He huffed a small laugh and sent a snapchat to Niall with the time filter slid across his dim face, and typed out, ‘only the strong survive’. He sent it, stood up, and made his way back into the bedroom. 

As usual, Harry was lying diagonally across the mattress, having made it an unconscious goal to take up as much space as possible. Liam slid under the covers and gently shifted his gangly legs, pressing his face against Harry’s sternum and letting the rhythmic rise and fall of Harry’s breath steady his whirling mind. Trying not to remember all of the times he had fallen asleep against Zayn just like this, Liam closed his eyes and eventually drifted into a dreamless sleep. 

~~~

When he woke up it was to an empty bed. The sun had risen high enough that it no longer glared directly into the bedroom. Liam groaned, rubbing his eyes and stretching widely. It must have been close to noon, and was ready to roll over and sleep for another twelve hours when he remembered - Zayn. Zayn was coming today. The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water and suddenly Liam was wide awake. He shot up, hand darting through the sheets for his phone. Upon finding it Liam saw that he had no texts, and that it was indeed only half past one. Ignoring the slight pang of disappointment in his gut, he flopped back onto the covers and thumbed through Instagram, trying to busy himself with things that were not Zayn. 

Eventually he gave up and went to his messages, scrolling down a ways to find his chat with Zayn. After he had deleted Zayn’s contact, the header on their conversation was just Zayn’s number, which Liam had physically willed himself not to memorize. The most recent message had been from Zayn of course; it read, ‘congrats on finishing the tour’. It had been sent on Halloween, after they had finished their last concert. Liam had been so drunk that night that Louis had had to confiscate his phone and so he hadn’t seen the message until the following day. Sober, it had been difficult to come up with an adequate response. 

Huffing, Liam swung himself out of bed. The house was strangely quiet. He peeked into the master bedroom to see Niall still asleep, but Louis was gone. Liam followed his intuition and hauled himself up the ladder and through the trapdoor back onto the roof, where sure enough, Harry and Louis were sharing an early morning spliff. They had their backs to Liam and were so deep in a conversation that they didn’t hear him approach. He caught snippets of sentences, heard Harry say ‘promise you’ll behave’ and something that sounded like ‘he deserves another chance’, to which Louis replied something that began with ‘arsing’ and ended with ‘dick’. 

“Mates,” Liam announced, coming up to sit beside Louis. Both of them were startled; Harry so much so that he dropped the spliff into his lap. 

“Fuck!” he exclaimed, brushing soot out of his shorts. “Snuck up on us there, babe,” he grimaced, examining the small black marks now marring his clothes. 

“Sorry,” Liam sighed, accepting the spliff gratefully from Harry. 

“We were just having a chat about our dear friend Zayn,” Louis intoned as Liam exhaled a cloud of smoke into the smoggy LA skyline. 

“And about how Louis isn’t going to scare him away with his rudeness,” Harry tacked on, receiving a sharp jab in the ribs in response. 

“Right,” was all Liam could think to say. The anticipation was now a tight coil in his belly, alternating between a searing heat and an icy chill. The weed helped neutralize him a bit, but not nearly enough. 

“Right. So Zayn said he’d be here around six, which I’m guessing means eight. So I was thinking we could order in something nice, maybe Italian?” Harry asked them, shrugging as if to say ‘it’s up to you’. Liam could tell they were trying to act normal with him, but it wasn’t doing much to help his current state. He nodded along mutely and tuned out as Louis and Harry began to argue about the best takeout places in LA. 

When they eventually headed back inside, it was to the smell of frying bacon and eggs.

“Chef Nialler!” Harry exclaimed, tripping over his own feet in an effort to run to Niall as fast as possible and plant a wet kiss on his cheek as he stood at the stove, monitoring three different frying pans of breakfast foods. Niall’s hair was tousled and he was wearing an apron and boxers and nothing else.

“Oi, those’r mine!” Niall yelled, pointing a spatula accusingly at Liam’s lower half. He looked down and saw the leprechaun print. 

“Not anymore, mate,” he grinned, elbowing Harry out of the way to steal a piece of bacon from the pan. 

“Paws off, Payno, you can wait until it’s ready,” Niall scolded, shooing them out of range. Harry and Liam and Louis obediently took their seats at the island beside the kitchen as Niall flipped pancakes, fried eggs, and thick strips of bacon onto plates and passed them out. 

“Cheers,” Louis said through a mouthful of egg, attacking his plate with vigor.

“Mmms frlly gtth,” Harry added, sputtering bits of pancake onto the floor. It was all so domestic it made Liam’s heart ache, even more so with the noticeable absence of Zayn there. It reminded him of the mornings on the tour bus, waking up to the steady hum of wheels beneath them, cooking shitty Ramen for breakfast and smoking in the back bedroom. And the time when Louis tried to make waffles using an iron. And the time when Harry took such an enormous shit that Niall and Zayn had asked the driver to stop on the highway so that they could get off and switch to the other bus. And all the times when it had just been Zayn and him, the whole bus to themselves, and they would fuck to the rhythm of the wheels, laughing when the bus hit a bump and they would be sent sprawling on top of each other. And-

“Li? Liam?” 

“Hm?” He hadn’t realized how spaced out he had been until Harry pinched his ear. 

“You gonna finish that?” Harry was pointing at Liam’s toast with his fork. In response, Liam shoved the entire piece of toast into his mouth whole, smiling crummily as Harry rolled his eyes in displeasure.

“Such a terrible human, honestly,” he said, sliding out of his seat to place his plate in the sink. “Nialler, you’re the best. That was delicious.” He then turned to face the other three, still sat at the counter. Liam recognized this stance of Harry’s - it meant pep talk time. He tried to escape but Harry stopped him quickly. “No, Liam, everyone stays for this. We need to talk about what’s gonna happen when Zayn gets here.”

The previously pleasant atmosphere of the kitchen suddenly felt tight with anticipation. Harry glared at each of them in turn, lingering on Louis. 

“As I’ve already told Louis, we are all to be on our best behavior. I know that Zayn’s said some shitty things about One Direction over the past few months, but that doesn’t mean that we need to start bickering about it while he’s here. Me and Niall and Liam spent a solid hour last night crying over how much we miss the good times, the times with all five of us. So this is going to be a fun, nostalgic, and happy reunion. Got it?”

“Got it,” Niall replied, upbeat. 

“Got it.” Came a grumble from Louis. 

“Liam?”

Three pairs of eyes now turned on him. He sighed deeply, thinking about Zayn’s eyes that night that they had fucked for the first time. “Got it.”

“Great! That’s settled then. Louis, come help me order something for dinner.” Harry clapped his hands as though dismissing a class, and he and Louis scampered off into the bedroom. 

Liam helped Niall tidy up a bit, and then Niall dragged him into a furious Fifa match. They played for a few hours before Liam started feeling restless and began doing pushups to calm himself. 

“Let’s get you a beer, mate,” Niall yelled exasperatingly at him after he’d finished a hundred. “I can’t watch this travesty any longer. And I’m tired of getting beat by this fool,” he gestured rudely to the giant flatscreen where he was sorely losing. “Let’s go see what Harry and Louis are up to.”

Liam complied, wiping the sweat from his brow and examining his hand to find that it was shaking. Honestly, he did need a beer. Or four. They filled up a cooler in the kitchen with drinks and headed up to the roof, where Harry and Louis were sunbathing in the late afternoon heat. 

“Pizza’s on its way,” Harry hummed as Niall tossed him a beer. 

“Pizza? After all that arguing you two settled on pizza? Lame,” Niall snorted, settling himself on the side of the tub. 

“You can say that again,” Louis remarked from behind a large pair of sunglasses. He was smoking a cigarette and flipping through Rolling Stone while Harry painted his toenails yellow. “I only agreed because Haz said he’d do my feet.” 

“Egh,” Niall and Liam groaned unanimously. Louis’ feet smelled the worst out of the four - five of theirs. 

They sat around drinking and talking aimlessly, trying to keep a casual conversation going, when Liam could tell that all of them were secretly counting down the minutes until Zayn’s arrival. Eventually the doorbell went off. They all froze subconsciously and stared at each other, until Niall laughed and the tension was eased a bit. 

“Probs the pizza guy, it’s only quarter past six,” Harry remarked casually, standing up and setting his beer beside the hot tub. “Louis, come help me carry them up?” he asked sweetly, to which Louis grumbled but complied. They disappeared down the hatch. 

Liam lit a cigarette and exhaled agitatedly. He glanced at Niall, who was busy rolling an enormously thick spliff for Zayn’s arrival. “That’s quite fat, babe,” he said, tapping his foot against Niall’s, unable to sit still.

“Shh, don’t break my concentration. This is a masterpiece in progress,” he reprimanded Liam, swatting his foot away. 

“Fine,” he mumbled, smoking his cigarette quickly. The sun was setting now, throwing a blazing spectrum of oranges and reds across the sky in the west. Liam stared at it for a few minutes, entranced by the progression of colors. He was about to point it out to Niall when the trap door swung open and Harry’s head emerged, followed by Louis. He barely had time to process the fact that neither of them was carrying any pizza boxes before a third dark head emerged, and then Harry was helping Zayn hoist himself onto the roof. 

The first thing Liam noticed was his hair - it was shaved along the sides, and the middle strip was long and bright gray. He didn’t hear Niall’s exclamations as he jumped up to tackle Zayn in a ferocious hug that sent both of them flying backwards onto one of the deck chairs. He felt himself stand up awkwardly, suddenly very aware of the fact that he was shirtless and there was a slight breeze that raised the hairs on his arms and then Zayn was laughing and disentangling himself from Niall and coming over to him. 

He watched Zayn’s mouth open, heard ‘Liam’ as Zayn took a few more tentative steps closer, and suddenly Liam realized that Zayn was hesitating, he wasn’t going to initiate any kind of grand reunion. Liam considered going in for a handshake, and then he considered turning around and sprinting off of the side of the house and away into the woods. But then he met Zayn’s eyes and it was like a tidal wave of emotions had been unleashed inside of him. Within the space of a second Liam was overwhelmed with the memory of Zayn’s lips on his, of Zayn’s hands tracing patterns on his skin, and suddenly he didn’t give a fuck about acting strong or stubborn. 

He launched himself at Zayn, whose eyes grew wide for a second before Liam was on him, wrapping his arms tightly around Zayn’s skinny frame and hugging him. He was surprised when Zayn hugged him back even harder, squeezing Liam as if he were the sole lifeline in an empty ocean, pressing his narrow torso against Liam’s bare one as if trying to cover himself in Liam like a blanket. “Fuck,” he murmured into Zayn’s silver hair, one hand coming up to tug at it. Zayn smelled the same, a heady mixture of cigarettes, Old Spice, and an earthy, woodsy scent whose origin Liam couldn’t name. 

“Liam,” Zayn muttered again, into his ear, giving him one last squeeze before releasing him and holding him at arm’s length. “You look good,” he said, slightly out of breath. 

“You too,” Liam breathed, cursing himself for the way his voice sounded so thick. It was true. Zayn looked really good, even though that didn’t mean much considering how Zayn always looked good. But Zayn smiled anyway, the corners of his mouth tilting up slightly in that small grin Liam had seen too many times. He opened his mouth but before he could say anything else, Harry cut in. 

“Well, now that we’re all back together, how about a celebratory spliff? Zayn, Niall’s been hard at work over here,” he gestured to Niall’s almost finished monster spliff that was lying on the pool table. 

“Yeah, please,” Zayn breathed, taking a step back from Liam, sliding out of his jacket and kicking off his shoes. They all gravitated around Niall, settled down on the ground; Harry beside Niall, Louis on Harry’s other side, Liam beside Louis, and Zayn sandwiched between Niall and Liam to complete the circle.

“The lads back together again!” Niall whooped triumphantly as he licked the edge of the spliff several times before sealing it tightly. 

“Amen to that,” Harry seconded, clapping Louis on the back a bit forcefully. Niall made to offer first blood to Zayn, but Zayn was quick to raise his hands in protest. 

“No, mate, it’s all yours,” he insisted, pushing the spliff back to Niall, who shrugged and stuck it between his lips. It took several flicks of the lighter for the thing to light properly, and even Niall had to cough thickly after an actual fog of smoke poured out of his mouth and nostrils. He passed it to Zayn next, who nodded in thanks.

Watching Zayn smoke brought back endless memories that Liam could hardly begin to sift through, yet at the same time he felt he was watching them all at once. He was acutely aware of where his and Zayn’s knees touched as they sat cross-legged on the ground, and when Zayn passed him the spliff and their fingers brushed, Liam felt his throat squeeze slightly. There was an odd silence as the spliff made its way round the circle once. The sky above them was an enormous canvas of reds and pinks and purples as the evening melted away. 

“This feels so surreal,” Liam heard himself say as the spliff completed a circle and returned to Niall. 

“Mhm,” Louis muttered beside him, the other boys nodding along in agreement. 

“The sky’s mad,” Zayn said quietly, head tilted backwards to take in all of the sunset. Liam stared at the curve of his adam’s apple, the sharp line of his chin. 

“Kinda looks like that time Zayn spray painted that one wall in the bus when we were in Europe, to remember?” Niall said hoarsely, following the statement with another cough as Zayn received the spliff, chuckling at the memory. 

“Paul was livid,” Harry said, smiling as well. 

“So angry. And, like, Zayn just kept adding to it. It was a picture of this little red monster guy, I remember cuz I almost instagrammed it but you wouldn’t let me, Zayn, said the world wasn’t ready for such a masterpiece.” There was a pause, and then all of them burst out laughing and just like that, it was as though the eight months of absence had been reduced to a few days. As the spliff came back to Liam he was struck by the simplicity of the moment - just the five of them, all back together. They had traveled the world, literally, and more than once, braved the millions of fans and the jetlag and not seeing their families and the confusion of what the fuck are we doing? how did we get here? and they’d lost one of their own along the way and were in the midst of an indeterminate hiatus but somehow, they had all found their way back to each other on this night. And sitting there beside Zayn once again, it felt so strangely right, Liam was aware of the fact that he was exactly where he was meant to be in that moment. 

He had spaced out again, pulled back into the conversation by Zayn’s knee jerking against his as he laughed at something Louis said. The spliff had been smoked, and the bright colors of the sunset had receded into more gentle tones of dark and darker blue. There was a lull in the conversation as Zayn and Louis lit up cigarettes each. Then Zayn shifted slightly, and cleared his throat. Liam’s stomach clenched again.

“Lads, I, er, have some things to say to you all,” Zayn began, smoke drifting around his face. 

“Let’s not get all soppy yet, the pizza hasn’t even arrived yet,” Harry booed, but Zayn ignored him. 

“No, really, I, like, need to say it right now. I…I was a dick. Those things I said in interviews about our music…I didn’t really mean them. Well, in a way, yeah, but I wasn’t trying to be hurtful, at all. Honest. I just kind of got in over my head during those first few months, just the freedom and all, it was a bit overwhelming. So I’m sorry. And Louis, that stupid twitter fight, about that-“

“Mate,” Louis grumbled, waving his hand as if to toss Zayn’s apology aside. “No harm. Shit happens.” 

“Yeah,” Zayn exhaled, looking grateful. “Shit happens. But like, I really really wanted to see all of you for a long time. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since I boarded the plane in Hong Kong. I missed my lads.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “But still…I thought, like, we were gonna stay in contact, like,” he paused again, and Liam felt the slightest shudder from Zayn’s body reverberate against him. From his side angle he could see the thin film of wetness in Zayn’s eyes. “I texted all of you. And you guys barely replied. Like, I get that you were upset, but-“ his eyes swiveled around the circle, ending at Liam, who felt a strong rush of guilt overwhelm him. “But I was hurt. And I get why you maybe didn’t want to talk, but I hope that we can move past it. Because to be honest I’m not ready to give up our four years together over petty rows or whatever. I love you guys. And I know we’re all at crossroads now, life and all, but no matter where each of us ends up going in these next months and years, I want us to be mates. We promised that to each other during that camping trip ages ago, all of us sitting round the fire, we promised that we’d always be mates. And I’m sorry that I wasn’t a mate these last few months, but I think we can all do better. At least I know I want to. Because I love you fucking boys.”

Louis’s cigarette had dangled untouched between his fingers during that entire speech, and a good few centimeters of ash hung precariously. Liam felt his entire body go stiff, and he willed himself not to cry, but when he looked up he saw tears rolling down Harry’s face as he stared at the ground. 

“Zayn,” Harry spoke thickly, wiping his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something but changed his mind, got up, and jumped into Zayn’s lap, shoving him down onto the ground. They hugged fiercely, until Niall rolled over on top of them, and Liam and Louis looked at each other and shrugged and hauled themselves onto the pile and it felt like, for the moment, all was forgiven. 

Lying like that, all tangled up in each others limbs, Liam remembered what it felt like to be whole. He wasn’t sure whose body was where, wasn’t sure where he began or ended, but when he tilted his head upwards it was to see Zayn’s face right there, inches away. Zayn was staring at him silently, and Liam stared back, at a loss for words. The air between them hung heavy with the weight of things unsaid. 

After a while Zayn broke the stare, rolling his head back to stare up at the sky. The stars were coming out, here and there. The sky opened above them like an upturned bowl whose edges disappeared behind the rocky LA skyline. Niall’s leg was thrown over Liam’s torso, and he was lying half on top of Louis, half on top of Harry. A hand closed around Liam’s; despite the tangle they were in he didn’t have to look down to know that it was Zayn’s, he could feel the familiar rings cold against his fingers and Zayn squeezed him. 

Without thinking, Liam squeezed back. He thought about all the conversations he had imagined in his head for all those months apart, all the scenarios he had carefully constructed of how he would act when he and Zayn eventually met. During that first month of Zayn’s absence, Liam had been so lost. He hadn’t understood why Zayn had had to leave. It had taken another month to actually force himself to adjust to Zayn’s absence, and even after that, he had felt bitter and sad for ages. But eventually Liam had come to understand why Zayn had left. He even cursed himself for not having seen the telltale signs earlier - how Zayn tended to stay in, hidden in his bunk, how the circles under his eyes seemed a shade darker each passing day. 

It wasn’t until now that Liam finally felt ready to accept those reasons - maybe because Zayn was physically here and it reminded Liam of how awful it was to fight with him, or maybe because Liam had just grown tired of running in circles around him. Or maybe he was just really pleasantly high. Either way, lying on the roof with Zayn’s hand wrapped around his own, and the rest of his boys scattered around him, Liam felt oddly solid. Like a small rock orbiting a large planet whose pull was irresistable, and he was tired of resisting. 

He couldn’t say what would happen next - when the high wore off, would he remember the sound of Zayn slamming the door on him? They had hurt each other in countless ways. Zayn had up and left, Liam had ignored him for eight months, but he was back now. And so for the moment, Liam was content to stay right where he was.


	2. i don't know what you came here for, it's almost that i wish we hadn't met at all

Tour, March 2015

Slamming the door and collapsing against it, Zayn fought back the tears with every ounce of willpower in his body. He balled his fists tightly, hung his head between his knees, and forced himself to breathe deeply. 

In, out. In out. In out in out.

It did little to soothe the angry palpitations of his heart and the clammy cold that was starting to crawl across his skin. Fuck. Fucking shit. Why did Liam have to make it a hundred times worse than it already was? Didn’t he understand that this was infinitely harder for Zayn than it was for him? Didn’t he understand that Zayn had four goodbyes to say, not just one? It was infuriating, these rows with Liam, because Zayn didn’t know how to say what he needed at the right moment. Just now, he should have manned up and let the tears flow and let Liam know the hurt that was inside of him. But of course Zayn had acted on the stupid inane anger that Liam somehow always incited inside of him when they argued like that. And, of course, he’d gone and fucked it up between them.

Huffing, Zayn shoved himself to his feet, not wanting Liam to open the door on him lying in the hallway. He walked quickly through the main room of the house, where the other lads were playing Fifa. 

“Zayn?” he heard Harry call after him, but he ignored it, storming into the master bedroom and shutting the door soundly behind him. He patted around in his pocket for his cigarettes before remembering that Liam had them. The angry ball in his chest pulsed and he was overcome with the urge to hit something. 

After a few more deep breaths, Zayn felt rational enough to sit down on one of the mattresses. He decided to roll himself a spliff and try to forget about their argument and be social with the other boys during their last few hours together. As he ferociously ground a generous amount of weed in Louis’s ridiculously expensive grinder, he replayed Liam’s heated words in his mind. 

We both knew this was more than just sex. You should have stopped a long time ago. 

You’ll be overseas fucking models and porn stars while I’m stuck here wanking to bloody memories. 

You can’t deny this. 

Groaning internally, Zayn patted the finely ground weed into his L-shaped paper comprised of two ZigZags, picturing the way Liam’s eyes unfocused as Zayn had shouted at him, we’re not kids anymore, it would never have lasted outside of the band, I need to live my own life. 

He was just licking down the edge of the spliff when there was a tentative knock at the door, before it opened and Niall’s curly blond head poked inside. Seeing that Zayn was sitting still and not punching a wall, he opened the door further and walked in. Zayn remained quiet as Niall fell onto the mattress beside him, could feel Niall’s eyes on his hands as they deftly finished the spliff. It wasn’t his best work, but he thought it was excusable given the state of his fucking head at the moment. He wordlessly passed it to Niall, who stuck it between his lips and lit it. They smoked about half of it together before Zayn opened his mouth. 

“I messed up,” he began, quietly, not looking up to see whether Niall was listening. “Liam. We had a row. He told me…he said I should have stopped fucking him a long time ago. That we both knew it was more than just sex. And I told him - well, I basically told him that he was being an idiot for thinking that.” 

He paused, listening to his words hang heavy in the air. Niall reached over with his free hand and rubbed Zayn’s shoulder. “Mate, I’m really sorry,” he said gently, hand traveling up to scratch behind Zayn’s ear. 

“I just - what was I supposed to say? I couldn’t just tell him the bloody truth, I mean, I’m leaving in a few hours and who knows when I’ll see him again?”

“I can’t tell you what to do, babe,” Niall sighed, scooting next to Zayn. “But it sounds like you haven’t even figured it out for yourself yet. Like, what all of this meant to you, y’know, the past few years with Liam.” He exhaled thoughtfully, and when Zayn didn’t reply, kept talking. 

“Like, when you two first started shagging, it honestly didn’t seem like anything changed between you guys. Yeah, maybe you were just a bit more touchy and shit, but it wasn’t a huge difference or anything. Like, it’s always been there with you two, this energy or something.”

“You sound like Haz,” Zayn scoffed, plucking the spliff from him. 

“Nah, I’m serious though,” Niall said, shrugging against Zayn’s shoulder. “And I know you know it, too. Remember when I caught you wanking to that picture-“

Zayn clapped a hand over Niall’s mouth before he could finish. “You promised never to breathe a word of that out loud!” he hissed, mortified. 

Niall licked and pried Zayn’s hand off, making a smacking noise with his lips. “Gross, your hand tastes like piss. And there’s no one else here.”

“Fine. But never again.”

“Fine. But Zayn, you know what I mean. You’ve always loved him more. And that’s what’s always driven you mad. It’s what makes you so terrified that you say stupid shit to him.”

“This time was different. He’s not going to forgive me.”

“He will.”

“But I’m leaving.”

There was a stagnant silence for a moment. Then Niall murmured, “yeah,” and nestled further into the crook of Zayn’s shoulder, turning his face into Zayn’s sweater. “You’re leaving.”

They stayed that way for long after the spliff had burned down, Niall’s words swirling about in Zayn’s clouded mind. The anger in his chest had burned down as well, simmered into a prickly regret that spiked his stomach uncomfortably. He ached for Liam, wanted nothing more than to tuck himself into Liam’s arms and kiss his chest and fuck him hard one last time. 

Zayn had never been good at saying goodbye.

~~

America, Summer 2015

He had convinced himself that leaving One Direction was the best decision he had made in a long time, and it was almost entirely true. 

Zayn couldn’t remember the last time he had walked outside without his shoulders hunched to his ears, surrounded by body guards, for the sheer fact that he would be literally torn to pieces by fangirls if he was alone. He couldn’t remember a time where he had longer than a week to be at home with his family, lying on the couch, wrestling with his sisters, cooking with his mum, chatting with his dad. And of course it had been nearly five years of day in, day out nonstop chatter about The Band, flowing in one ear and out the next. So when all of that suddenly came to a full stop it was…startling. 

After the initial uproar at his announcement of leaving the band died down, Zayn found himself floating in a strange bubble of freedom. He could do what he wanted to every day. No more early morning interviews, photoshoots, promos, or grueling concert schedules. No more singing the same songs every other night. It was almost completely a relief. It should have been, really - he’d gone straight home for a month, spent nearly all of it brainstorming songs and spray painting in the garage. (And getting piss-drunk and texting Liam and crying to his mum when Liam never replied.)

After his sisters had started complaining that he was eating all the food in their house, he’d flown back out to New York to meet with people he’d always vaguely kept in touch with for when the time came to start whatever it was that he would create next. 

It had been at a penthouse party in some ridiculously beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side that Zayn had finally met Malay. They clicked instantly, and after Zayn had showed him a few of his songs, no more than rough sketches and bars here and there, he had insisted that they fly out to LA the following week to start working. 

Zayn had been in LA for a few months now, staying in a rented house up in Bel Air, away from the smog and congestion of the city. He liked LA well enough. Though he found many of the people a bit tiring, and the constant sunshine a bit annoying at times, at least the weed was exceptional. He had turned his house into the ultimate man cave and spent weeks on end with Malay in his designated dark room, smoking endless joints and singing riffs back and forth and splattering the walls with glow-in-the dark paint. 

It was almost total relaxation, it should have been, except for fucking Liam, always Liam, stuck in the recesses of his mind like a pebble he couldn’t seem to dislodge no matter how hard he tried. 

He had known that this part of it wasn’t going to be easy, but he had never imagined it would be this hard either. And it fucking scared the shit out of him. He wasn’t supposed to still be thinking about Liam after five months apart. His constantly drifting mind wasn’t meant to hover in the days before he had told Liam how he really felt. He wasn’t supposed to remember the tiniest details, like the fluid motion of Liam pulling off his sweaty shirt after a run and tossing it into the corner of the room before he headed into the shower. And he definitely wasn’t supposed to picture Liam in place of whatever girl he was screwing, squeeze his eyes shut and recall the way Liam’s eyes would crinkle in pleasure and his hand would grip Zayn’s bicep as Zayn pushed into him slowly and-

“Yo, you there?” Malay shouted, rapping on the door to Zayn’s bedroom. 

“Shit,” he muttered, pulling his pants back up over his stiff cock and jumping off the bed to pull open the door. “Sup?” he inquired casually, hoping Malay didn’t notice the flush in his cheeks. It was hot as hell anyway. 

“Not much brother, I just wanted to let you know about a little trip that’s coming up in the near future,” Malay said, walking through the bedroom out towards the balcony, motioning for Zayn to follow. He did, warily. 

“Trip?”

“Yup. We’re going camping, dude!” He said it with so much enthusiasm that Zayn felt obliged to smile in response. 

“That’s…sick.”

“Hell yeah it is. I’ve been thinking about it and I think it’s time we really, you know, get into this.” Malay motioned at Zayn with both hands as if Zayn was a piece of clay he was getting ready to mold. “Nothing like the great outdoors to stimulate your creativity, get it to the next level, you feel? Plus, the acoustics in the woods are fucking beautiful, you’ll sound like a wood nymph out there.”

“I feel like you’re gonna force me to do a bunch of acid and we’re just gonna trip for a week straight and die from dehydration,” Zayn deadpanned, scratching at his beard. 

“Nah man, we’ll have water, lots of it. And as for the acid, obviously if that’s something you wanna do, I’m always down.” Malay said enthusiastically, and Zayn could tell that there would be no changing his mind about this. He groaned. 

“Okay, fine. We’re going camping. When do we leave?”

“Two days, so start getting your shit together!” Malay called over his shoulder as he walked back inside. 

“Well fuck me,” Zayn sighed as Malay left. He went inside and reached for a spliff from the pile that he had rolled a few nights ago when he had been unable to get to sleep. Maybe a camping trip would get his mind off of Liam for a bit. The notion made his insides churn slightly. As he lit up the spliff and exhaled in familiarity, Zayn suddenly realized it was because the thought of not thinking about Liam scared him.

~~

The woods were dusty, dry, and hot. They were also beautiful beyond anything Zayn had ever seen. 

He had never really been properly camping, like, without a car at least a kilometer away. Malay had driven them up to one of the higher hills in the Angeles National Forest, parked in a ditch along a side road, and forced an insanely heavy backpack onto Zayn’s skinny shoulders. They had hiked for almost two hours along dirt paths that were hardly even there, through sparse trees, sloping upwards until they emerged at a large clearing at the top of the mountain, with the forest stretching from their feet in every direction as far as the eye could see. 

Even exhausted and sweaty, Zayn found himself falling in love with it. 

They set up the tent, a large four-person spectacle into which sleeping bags and pads were shoved. Malay disappeared to gather wood while Zayn busied himself with a cigarette. When Malay returned, dumping a large armful of wood onto the ground, he was grinning mischievously 

“What?” Zayn asked, taking extreme care to grind his cigarette into the dust. 

Silently, Malay reached into his back pocket, extracted his wallet, and pulled out a small plastic baggie, one of the tiny ones that Zayn recognized from the tour as being used for coke and molly. Only this time, he squinted, there were four tiny blotters of paper inside of it. 

“You madman,” he whispered, meeting Malay’s grin with his own. “Please tell me you’ve done this before.”

“Oh yeah,” Malay smiled, sitting down on a stray log and reaching for a water bottle. “It’s up to you, dude. We can do this now, or later, or not at all. This whole trip is for you, man. I know you have a lot of things inside of you that are itching to come out. I wanna help you in any way. But it’s up to you.” 

Zayn reached for the baggie in awe. He had never done acid before and, staring at the small squares covered in strange colorful designs, he realized that he really really wanted to. When he nodded, Malay burst into a laugh. He clapped Zayn on the arm and pulled him down onto the log. Sitting side by side, they each placed a blotter into their mouths. 

It was late afternoon and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Surprisingly it didn’t taste like anything. Zayn held it on his tongue for almost an hour, and when Malay told him that he could swallow it, the sun had started its descent in earnest. 

Nothing could have prepared Zayn for the trip. He didn’t realize he was in it until he concentrated on the jagged line the horizon and watched as the pinks and purples of the sunset literally melted along the edges of the mountains. He turned to face Malay and when their eyes met, Zayn gasped because Malay’s eyes were his own eyes. Malay smiled at him, grabbed his hand, and said, “I’ve got you dude. We’re gonna do this. We’re gonna fucking do this!” 

Elation bloomed in his chest. Zayn stood up and faced the mountains all around him, opening his arms and wanting to embrace it all, every tree, every rock and root. It was all so beautiful. As the evening slipped into night, he felt himself start to cry with the overwhelming onslaught of emotions that were now flowing through him like water. He felt fluid suddenly, as if he were everywhere all at once, he was sinking into the ground and rising above it at the same time. Time ebbed and flowed around him somewhere in the distance, a forgotten thing. 

Something - a twig snapping somewhere - brought Zayn back to his surroundings. It was pitch black and he was lying on his back, staring up at the stars. He sensed Malay lying beside him, could feel his energy radiating so strongly. For the first time in a long time, Zayn felt completely safe and free. Here in the middle of the woods, gazing at the infinitely stretching bowl of blackness and stars above him, with his friend by his side, Zayn understood so many things all at once. And he wanted, needed, to say them out loud. 

“Bro,” he began, groping blindly beside him until his hand found Malay’s. He clung onto it, squeezing tightly. Malay squeezed him back in silent affirmation. “Bro, like, I love you so much, you know that right?”

“Yeah man, I know. I love you too, dude.”

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Zayn said, his voice hoarse for some reason. Oh, right, he had been yelling earlier. “It’s, like, quite personal, no one really knows bout it except my mum and the lads.” 

“Whatever it is, it’s safe with me,” Malay replied, his voice quiet but supportive. Zayn felt his hand being squeezed again, so he continued. 

“I think - I’m pretty sure that I’m still in love with him. I don’t think I ever really stopped, to be honest. When I left I thought I was doing the right thing by ending it, but now I’m feeling - I don’t even know, like, he’s just always here, in my mind.” Zayn paused, taking a deep lungful of cool, dry desert air. “I don’t know what to do. I just know that I still love him.”

Beside him, Malay shifted slightly. “Who?” he asked softly, covering Zayn’s one hand with both of his. 

“Liam of course.”

Saying Liam’s name out loud was like ripping off a plaster to discover that the wound underneath was far from healed. No, it was worse, it was like the beast of his feelings that he’d been trying to shove out of sight for so long had escaped and was clawing its way back through Zayn’s chest, tearing through his consciousness and subconsciousness and everything else. 

“I had a feeling,” Malay said after a soft silence. “You never did seem very…into any of those girls. And the shit you write, I mean fuck. It makes sense. So much of it is about him, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It is. I can’t stop myself. It just happens.”

“So let it happen.” 

Zayn felt Malay sit up beside him, and scoot until he was resting against Zayn’s propped knees. “This is what it’s about, dude. Music, life, love. If you love him, then tell him. And I don’t mean call him up right now - “ at that Zayn’s fingers twitched in muscle memory of all the times he had sloppily thumbed through his phone after far too many drinks and pressed the call button under Liam’s name. He cringed. “ - I mean, you are so, so talented. You have the gifts of your voice, and your mind. If Liam is what makes you feel all these things, don’t shy away from it. Don’t be afraid to feel everything that you’re suppressing. And this is not just the acid talking, dude, seriously, this is how shit is created. Emotion. Love. Feel it.”

“Bro,” Zayn’s voice cracked as he sat up to face Malay. His head spun with the onslaught of confusion and regret and the realization of how much he missed Liam. “I don’t know if I can, like, access all of it. All the memories and shit. Some of it was almost too good to be true, like, it hurts to remember - “ he sniffed, gulping the lump furiously down his throat. “ - to remember how happy we were. Even when we fought, even when we were angry at each other, it just fueled this fire of, like, passion. And now - now, even though I’ve got a house and a car and you and all this freedom, it just feels a bit empty without him here to share it with.”

An arm wrapped around his skinny shoulders and drew him in close. “I’m here for you, dude,” Malay breathed. “We’re gonna transform all of this into some crazy fucking music. You’re gonna write more beautiful shit, we’re gonna record it, you might cry, I’ll definitely cry, we’ll smoke some green and talk about it, or not talk about it. And I promise, Zayn, you’ll figure out what to do. Music gives us answers to questions we don’t even realize we’re asking. You say you don’t know if you can do it, but dude, I know you. And I know that you’re so much stronger than you give yourself credit for.” Malay paused to draw Zayn in tighter. “You can do it.”

“No,” Zayn said, burying his face into the crook of Malay’s elbow and remembering the weight of Liam’s arm draped around his waist. He inhaled, exhaled. “We can do it.” 

~~

LA, November 2015

Driving up the curved roads to the address Niall had texted him, Zayn had felt ready to shit out his stomach. Every turn made him grip the steering wheel tighter. When he pulled into the front yard of the massive, modern complex, he had to take a few minutes to remind himself how to breathe. 

Rehearsing his greeting under his breath, Zayn struggled to calm his palpitating heart. It was the boys, his boys, it wasn’t as though he were going to meet the bloody Queen herself. Although at this rate, Zayn thought, he might have preferred the latter option.

Finally he got out, walking on shaky legs to ring the doorbell. It had taken a few minutes before he heard muted footfalls on the other side, and he considered running for it, just jumping back into his car and zooming away. But then Harry was pulling the door open and Louis was right behind him. The look of surprise on both their faces made him think that perhaps they hadn’t been expecting him yet, he was notorious for showing up late to places. But it only lasted a split second, before Harry was pulling him in for a tight hug and nuzzling into Zayn’s neck, muttering “welcome back”. Over Harry’s shoulder, Zayn’s eyes met Louis’s. He gave Zayn a steely glare that softened when Harry released him and he wrapped his arms around Louis’s initially unyielding frame before he could second guess himself. And miraculously, Louis had hugged him back. 

Things were going better than expected, he remembered thinking, until Louis pulled him aside right before they were about to ascend the ladder to the roof, and told him, in a tone of voice that booked no argument, “Take it easy on Liam. He’s been shitting bricks all day so don’t pull any moves, yeah?”

He was halfway up the ladder before Zayn could process what he had said. Harry just flashed him a smile and patted him on the shoulder, throwing an “It’ll be fine” over his shoulder as he scrambled up after Louis. 

Upon hauling himself onto the roof, Zayn had felt the wind knocked out of him as a blonde, tanned blur barreled into him at high speed. Niall’s unmistakeable scent of beer and something sweeter filled his nostrils and his laugh vibrated in Zayn’s eardrums. But nothing could have prepared him for the sight of Liam, only a few feet away from him, shirtless and shivering a bit, hair dripping wet, set against the blueish-yellow backdrop of the sunset. 

“Liam,” he had breathed, rooted to the spot, unable to move. Liam’s eyes bored into Zayn’s with a familiar intensity and for a moment Zayn was terrified that Liam would turn around, or ignore him, or even worse, refuse to touch him. But then Liam’s arms were wrapped around him, pulling him in close and it felt as though he had been submerged beneath the ocean, Liam’s overwhelming physical proximity flooding his pores, his nose, his eyes. He couldn’t breathe, felt tears being squeezed out of him, memories of this, Liam’s skin, his strong arms, the birthmark on his neck beneath Zayn’s tongue, the way it tasted. He could have stayed there forever. 

That had been several hours ago; since Zayn had gotten there, the five of them had smoked through a hearty portion of Niall’s half-ounce of medical weed that he had had delivered to the house earlier that day. It was really superb shit, if Zayn was being honest. Some strange indica-sativa hybrid that didn’t make him overly lethargic, gave him a funny little head kick that kept him awake. It was called Gorilla something…fuck, he couldn’t remember. Whatever. It didn’t really matter.

Pizza had arrived at one point, and Niall and Louis had had a competition to see who could eat an entire pizza in the least amount of time (Niall had won) followed by a beer chugging contest (Louis had won). More smoking and talking. After Zayn had given them the apology he knew was long due, the conversation started to flow more freely. They had filled him in on the rest of the tour, and what each of them had gotten up to while at home, and Zayn told them about his camping trip with Malay. Harry in particular was extremely interested in thumbing through the pictures Zayn had taken in the forest, just random trees and bushes and sunrises and sunsets, a few animals here and there. 

He was surprised when Louis had pulled him aside at one point and told him how much he had missed having a proper partner in crime, and not at all surprised when Harry tried to show off by taking three successive shots of Hennessey and ended up going around kissing all of them a few minutes later. After which he passed out on one of the pool chairs, and Niall gently covered him in some beach towels. 

“He’s just weak,” Louis was saying, waving a spliff animatedly as he pointed at Harry. “He’s still a little boy, he can’t handle his liquor. It’s these fucking juice cleanses, they make you lose all your stamina.”

“I agree actually. I tried to do it and I was beat after one day. They really take it out of you, them juices. Plus they give you the craps like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” Liam agreed, chewing on a pizza crust as they sat with their legs in the hot tub. 

Zayn’s foot kept bumping Liam’s underwater; every time, Liam’s eyes would quickly flick up to Zayn’s and he would give him a tiny little grin. It made Zayn’s heart swell, to be so near to him again. But it wasn’t enough…he couldn’t just sit here watching Liam nibble on crust and talk and smoke, God, Zayn wanted so badly to shove him to the ground and kiss that little grin…

“What about that time we got food poisoning in Cambodia? That was bloody awful,” Niall interjected, splashing Liam with warm water. “And bloody,” he added on as an afterthought. Zayn elevated his cigarette away from the hazardous water, smiling when Liam pulled his legs out of the water and poked Zayn with a wet toe. 

Without thinking Zayn grabbed Liam’s foot with his free hand and held onto it for a second, digging his thumb into the soft flesh of Liam’s heel and watching the way Liam’s face darkened.  
He let go of it, but not before noticing the pointed look Niall shot at Louis from across the tub. Zayn scanned his brain for something to fill the small silence that followed, but before he could open his mouth, Louis and Niall stood up simultaneously. 

“We’re just gonna go, uh, make some pasta,” Niall said, staring at them with a funny look on his face. “You guys should stay up here though.”

“Yeah, carbo load,” Louis added on pointlessly. 

“Right,” Liam said softly, staring at the ground. 

“So we’ll go, then,” Louis giggled, grabbing Niall’s elbow and dragging him towards the hatch. 

It was quiet then, aside from Harry’s soft snores, the hum of the hot tub jets, and the thudding of Zayn’s heart as he lifted his gaze to see Liam sitting very still. The contours of his body were illuminated by the lights from the little candle lanterns that Harry had set around the roof to give them enough light to roll spliffs and not trip over anything. 

“That was the most un-subtle exit I’ve ever seen.” 

Zayn looked up to see Liam staring at him, a small smile at the corners of his mouth. He laughed. “Yeah.”

“Like, could not have been more obvious,” Liam chuckled oddly, then sighed. Zayn was hyperaware of the outer darkness around them, a night so deep blue it could have swallowed them both whole. He stood up, swaying slightly, at a loss for words. Fuck, he was pretty stoned. Liam looked up at him questioningly, eyes wide. Zayn felt his chest swoop.

“Help me move these,” he gestured to the other pool chairs. Liam nodded and got up. They each dragged a chair away from Harry’s earsight, over to the side of the roof that looked out towards downtown LA. They were nice chairs, Zayn thought faintly, as he reclined his and leaned back, rummaging in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. Liam was wearing a hoodie and a pair of leprechaun boxers now. His silhouette was a familiar curve against the dark mountains behind him. During the past few months his stubble had grown out a bit, and maybe Zayn had been imagining it but he looked slightly skinnier, less bulky, than he had back in March. Zayn didn’t know how to feel about that. If maybe Liam was eating less because he had been consumed with thoughts of Zayn. 

“Oi,” Liam tapped his arm, hand extended expectantly. 

“Oh - right, sorry,” Zayn stuttered, tapping another cigarette into his palm. He lit his own, then tossed the lighter to Liam. The flare of the flame as he cupped it gently around his cigarette illuminated the faint blue circles under his eyes. 

“Tired?” Zayn asked as they exhaled in unison, twin spirals of smoke into the skyline. 

Liam shrugged. “A bit.” He shifted on his chair so that he was facing Zayn. “When Niall said you were coming, I might have freaked out a bit and forgotten to sleep.” He sighed deeply, reaching over to ash his cigarette on Zayn’s cushion. 

“Hey,” Zayn protested lightly, but he made no move to swat Liam’s hand away. “If it makes you feel any better, I nearly shat myself on the drive over. Was, like, proper worried you wouldn’t want to see me.” Saying it out loud made Zayn feel ashamed of himself. He was grateful for the cool breeze that fanned his suddenly warm cheeks. 

“I was kind of planning on being a bit more stand-offish, to be honest,” Liam said quietly, no longer looking at him. “Thought I could convince myself I was still angry with you.”

Hope bloomed in Zayn’s chest and he tried to bat it down. “You should be,” he heard himself say. 

“You’re right, I should be,” Liam answered, flicking his cigarette off the edge of the roof. He looked up at Zayn thoughtfully. “I was angry for a while, Z. We all were. You left us. You left. It was hard.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I wish-“ he stopped himself because he didn’t know what to say. How to express all the things he wished could have been different. 

Liam didn’t seem to notice and kept talking. “For the longest time, I didn’t get it. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think I understand now. So, no, I’m not angry at you for leaving anymore.” 

Before he could say anything else, Zayn reached over and grabbed Liam’s hand. He almost shuddered at the physical contact, Liam’s skin warm and a bit wrinkly from the hot tub. Instinctively he rubbed his thumb over Liam’s knuckles. 

“Zayn, what’re you-“

“Look - I just - ah, fuck it.” 

He got up, tossing his cigarette away, and swung a leg over Liam’s outstretched body. He groaned as his hips slotted over Liam’s and Liam arched up against him unconsciously. 

“Zayn, I-“

Liam’s voice was cut off as Zayn brought a hand up to his face, stroked his thumb once over Liam’s cheekbone, and leaned down and kissed him. 

Zayn was unprepared for the explosion in his chest when Liam’s tongue met his halfway, when his hands wound around to press at the small of Zayn’s back. 

He could feel his eyes burning as he tipped his head slightly and kissed Liam more deeply, his other hand coming up to wrap loosely around Liam’s neck, feeling Liam’s adam’s apple bob beneath his fingertips.

Shit, he had missed this. The way Liam groaned when Zayn licked along his lower lip. The way his hands tightened on Zayn’s hips as Zayn ground himself down on Liam with purpose, his own dick straining through his jeans against Liam’s in his stupid boxers. All of his senses blurred together into the one overarching sensation of Liam, his hands, his mouth, his tongue. 

He moved his hand between their bodies, tried to slide it beneath the waistband of Liam’s boxers, but suddenly Liam’s fingers closed tightly around his wrist. 

“What-“

“Zayn, wait,” Liam panted, pulling away and breathing heavily. He moved Zayn’s hand away and suddenly he felt extremely scared. 

“You - you don’t want this?” he gasped, hating the pitiful whine in his voice. When Liam didn’t immediately reply, Zayn edged away, scooting down towards the end of the chair so that their dicks were no longer pressed against each other. 

“I just - you have to explain this to me, Zayn, because I’m kind of lost,” Liam huffed, running his hands over his buzzed head and glancing up at Zayn agitatedly. 

“Li, I came back to see you, I missed you so fucking much you have no idea,” Zayn stammered, confused, unable to stop himself. “I thought I was over you but I’m not, I’m so far from it, I’m still so in love with you and I’m so fucking scared that you hate me and I don’t know what to-“

“Wait. Wait, stop. What do you mean, you thought you were over me? You were the one who said we were never dating.” 

“I know, I fucked up back then, I just didn’t know how to tell you and I didn’t want to mess it up and scare you away, and I just-“

“You literally told me that it didn’t mean anything.” His voice was suddenly ice cold and deathly quiet. Zayn reached out to try and grab Liam’s hand but he yanked it away. All the previous elation Zayn felt had turned to shards of glass in his chest. He stood up, hands shaking. 

“Liam, please listen-“

“It doesn’t make sense,” Liam muttered, not looking up at him. “Everything you said that day. You said you couldn’t wait to fuck around with all those girls in New York, Zayn, what the hell? Now you’re telling me you fucking missed me this much, this whole time?”

“I fucked up, okay?” Zayn cried, throwing his hands into the air, heart pounding madly. “I was scared and tired and I didn’t mean any of that shit! If I could take it back I swear to god I would, Liam, I was trying to piss you off-“

“Well you did a bloody great job at that!” Liam shouted suddenly, standing up to meet him. “It was always more than sex to me, I thought you felt that way too!”

“I fucking did! You were always more to me, even before the sex, from the very fucking beginning, Liam you have no idea because I never had the balls to tell you because I was so scared that you would get freaked out and I’ve always fucking loved you and - and -“ Zayn was sobbing, throat raw from yelling. He could barely stand to look Liam in the eye because of what he was afraid to see. 

He waited for Liam to scream back at him but when he looked up, Zayn saw that Liam was crying as well. 

“You can’t just do that to people,” Liam whispered hoarsely, falling down onto the chair, shoving his head into his hands. “Zayn, you can’t just tell me that we were both kids and that it didn’t mean anything, and then you leave - you just left me, I mean - and now you come back after eight months thinking we can just pick right back up with the fucking? It can’t work like that, Zayn, it just can’t. I can’t. I don’t want to waste another eight months trying to forget about how you made me feel.”

Liam turned away from him. He was relatively sure his heart had stopped, he had stopped breathing. “Liam, can I just explain, please let me-“

“I said I wasn’t angry at you for leaving the band. But I’m still angry that you think it’s okay to try and jump me after we haven’t seen each other, let alone talked-“

“And whose fucking fault is that, Liam? I messaged you so many times and you never replied, how the fuck do you think that feels?” Zayn countered, torn between a strong desire to strangle Liam and an equally strong desire to kiss him again. “Fucking look at me!” he screamed, infuriated with talking to Liam’s back after he had waited months and months just to see his face. “Tell me that you didn’t miss me, tell me that you didn’t think about me and I’ll walk out of here and you don’t have to see me again but let me just tell you, Liam, that I fucking thought about you every single fucking day and how much I regretted getting on that plane without telling you the truth because-“

“Zayn, stop,” Liam said quietly, voice no longer quivering. He turned back around, seeking out Zayn’s eyes in the dark. He looked like a ten-year old in the soft candle light, bleary eyes not even making an effort to blink back the tears. “I missed you alot, Z. But we can’t just make out and pretend like everything’s back to normal.” Liam paused, as if considering whether or not to keep breaking Zayn’s heart from where he sat. 

Zayn swallowed loudly, tears dripping down his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice cracking feebly. 

“Look, we can talk in the morning, yeah?” Liam said, lowering his head into his palms and rubbing at his eyes, voice still shaky. 

“I, uh, have a flight. Going back to England tomorrow.”

“Oh.” He could hear the hard sadness in the single syllable and quickly backtracked. 

“I can change it though, like-“

“Don’t bother.”

“No, really, like, I’d rather be here-“ he winced as soon as the words were out but it was too late to take them back.

“Just go, Zayn. It sounds like you still have a lot to sort through.”

They were both silent for a moment, Liam sitting on his chair, Zayn standing behind him.

“You should visit me,” Zayn stuttered quickly. “Please. I’ll give you the address.”

“Right,” Liam huffed. 

Silence. 

Zayn opened his mouth to say something but realized he had nothing left to say. So he turned and almost sprinted to the hatch, throwing himself down the ladder, blinded by the tears that began flowing freely. 

~~~

He thought about changing his flight and staying for a few more days, but then he remembered the stunned look on Liam’s face when Zayn had tried to palm his dick, as if he was looking at a stranger. 

So Zayn had driven straight to the airport without bothering to pack a bag. Two hours later he was sitting in the front row of a nearly empty first class cabin and still wondering what the fuck had just happened. 

After making his grand escape from the roof, Zayn had ran through the first door he could find and it had thankfully happened to be Niall’s bedroom. He’d thrown himself onto the bed and shoved his face into a pillow, muffling his huge, body-wracking sobs until Niall had emerged from the bathroom and gathered Zayn up in his arms. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he had shuddered, burying himself into Niall’s chest. One of Niall’s hands rubbed soothing circles in his back, the other was carding softly through his hair. “I really fucked up this time. Worse than in Hong Kong. I thought - I didn’t know he was so upset, I just threw myself on top of him and kissed him and he p-pushed me away, oh fuck…” he sobbed quietly, soaking Niall’s t-shirt in tears. 

“Shh, babe, easy,” Niall murmured, stroking Zayn’s forehead head, smoothing his hair out of his face. “Things like this are hard, y’know. Liam really misses you, babe. You fuckers are great at talking about everything with each other, except this.” 

At that Zayn had chuckled wetly, because it was true. At least for him. He had developed a knack for royally butchering any conversation that he and Liam had these days. 

Fuck, he had really screwed it up today. 

He didn’t know what he had been expecting - had he honestly thought that Liam would take him ‘back’ when they hadn’t even been ‘together’? He thought about that night with Malay up on the mountain, when he had told him, in complete honesty, how he had felt about Liam ever since the beginning. Zayn realized he had never allowed himself to be so open about it and it was so freeing to say the words out loud, ‘I’ve loved him since the day we met’. 

As the thrumming of the plane had become earnest beneath him, the sign that it was about to take off, Zayn had whipped out his phone, thumbed down to his chat with Liam - filled with blue messages, all sent from him - and quickly tapped out the address of his new home. He sent it just as the wheels of the plane lifted off the ground, watching as the message flew into the air with it, biting down on his hand as the gray ‘Delivered’ appeared underneath it. Then he switched the phone to airplane mode, swallowed two Advil PM’s, and slept. 

~~ 

Hertfordshire, Winter 2015

He holed himself up in his new house, breaking it in properly. Days spent painting, shooting arrows from his new crossbow, riding his bike, taking trips into town to spend ungodly amounts of money on expensive alcohol, smoking through endless sacks of weed…they blurred together into one long endless winter. 

But more than anything, in the month that followed, Zayn poured himself into his music. He wrote songs, practiced riffs, recorded harmonies with himself, took stupid videos on his iPhone of whatever happened to catch his fancy. A cloud or a bird or a kid on the playground. And subconsciously, or maybe consciously, he managed to weave Liam into every fiber of his creations. 

As he and Malay worked to narrow down the track list for his album, it dawned on Zayn how many of the lyrics were about Liam. How so many of the songs captured the way Zayn felt, at different times of day, thinking about Liam. How he felt certain he could write a hundred songs and none of them could come close to capturing just how badly Zayn missed him. 

And all of it he had done in the hope that Liam might ‘take him back’, whatever that even meant at this point. 

He had imagined repeatedly how their reunion would go. He had pictured himself spreading Liam’s body out in front of him once more, being able to finally kiss him and touch him without being half-dead with exhaustion, without the old lingering discontent in the back of his mind, without having to worry about being too loud or closing the curtains all the way. He had thought that their argument back in March had been forgiven, along with his decision to leave, but that was clearly not the case. 

Zayn didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to remedy the situation. He was terrified of reaching out to Liam, he hated being the one constantly texting him or asking sideways questions about Liam to Harry or Niall, who were becoming continuously more annoyed with him, he was sure. The other day, Zayn had Skyped Harry to wish him a merry Christmas, and he’d thrown in a casual ‘how’re the other lads?’ to which Harry had just shaken his head, laughing a little. 

“Y’know, Zayn, you’re a great guy but sometimes you can be a really thick idiot. Call him yourself. We don’t want to be your arsing messengers.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me, Haz,” Zayn mumbled, hiding his face in the sleeve of his large sweater. 

“Well, have you tried?”

Zayn paused guiltily, and shook his head. He had been too afraid of being rejected again.

Even talking with Malay was proving to be less and less helpful. Though he was an amazing listener and gave sound advice, he too seemed to be frustrated with Zayn’s lack of desire to reach out to Liam. Or rather, lack of ability. He wanted to talk to Liam more than anything, but he had properly deleted his number and couldn’t bring himself to ask one of the boys for it - he could tell they were all still upset at him for the state he had apparently left Liam in.

So as winter dragged through Hertfordshire, Zayn distracted himself with the only ways he knew; weed, alcohol, painting, and music. He stayed in his house, barricaded the front door, stocked up his pirate bar, and tried to force himself to forget what Liam smelled like, tasted like, sounded like. 

For a while it seemed to work, until it didn’t.

~~

The foreign sound of a key scraping in a lock woke Zayn up one morning, although - was it morning? He blinked and tried to open his eyes and groaned when doing so took monumental effort. He was extremely, incredibly hungover. 

Keeping his eyes closed closed, Zayn took a deep breath, and allowed his body to interpret his surroundings. He immediately realized that he was not in his own home, because nothing that he owned was as soft as whatever surface he was currently lying on (he preferred thick, hard mattresses). Also the air smelled different; a bit more dingy, not necessarily bad. His first thought was that he had been kidnapped, but when the sound of a door swinging open somewhere to his left forced Zayn to actually open his eyes, he saw that this was not the case. Or if it was, his kidnapper definitely knew how to treat their victims quite nicely. 

He was lying on a sofa in the corner of a tiny, semi-lit living room, covered in a thick quilt, with a small television within arms reach to his left. Weak sunlight filtered through a large window on the wall opposite him. He had a direct view into the adjoining kitchen, also small, the glare off its stainless steel cabinets reflecting too harshly into his eyes. Between the kitchen and the room that he was in was the door, that was currently wide open. There was a mumbled ‘fuck’ before a person staggered into the apartment, carrying two shopping bags full of groceries. Whoever it was was dressed in grey sweatpants and a black sweatshirt, making it hard for Zayn to discern their gender. He guessed it was a girl. When the person placed the bags on the floor, straightened up, and saw that Zayn was awake, they smiled and pushed their hood off their head and Zayn saw that his prediction was correct - it was a girl, and holy fuck, his heart nearly stopped when he understood suddenly how he had ended up here. 

The resemblance was striking. In the half-second that Zayn stared at her, it felt as though he were looking into a mirror of the past, specifically 2013, more specifically, Liam in 2013. Her hair was buzzed almost to her scalp, eyebrows were dark and long, her almond-shaped brown eyes regarded him curiously. The only difference was her lips - they were thinner than Liam’s, a fact that Zayn had obviously overlooked last night. Aside from that, she could have been Liam’s female twin. 

Fuck.

“Hey,” the girl said with a distinctly American accent. Her voice was gentle and clear. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up. How’re you feeling?” 

Zayn closed his eyes and groaned in response, thoughts swirling too rapidly for him to come up with a coherent reply. He heard a small chuckle. When he opened his eyes the girl had moved into the kitchen, and was busily putting away her groceries. 

Zayn watched her for a few moments before attempting to sit up. His head felt like it was splitting in two, and immediately the faint throbbing behind his eyes became so immense that he fell back down into the sofa’s soft grip. The initial shock of seeing someone so close in appearance to Liam was wearing off now, the adrenaline slowly leaving his veins, and it began to dawn on him that he was literally in a complete stranger’s apartment. 

“I’m making coffee, you want some? Or are you a tea person?” the girl called from the kitchen, leaning over the countertop to peer into the living room. 

“Coffee would be great,” Zayn croaked, deciding to just go with it. Oh no, Malay was going to kill him, they were supposed to record later in the day. Speaking of which - “Is my phone - like, have you seen it?” he called hoarsely, patting around his jacket pockets. 

“Yeah, I’ve got it, you were out of battery so I charged it last night. One sec-“ there was the sound of running water, then a switch being flicked, before the familiar murmur of the percolating coffee machine filled the apartment. “Here,” she said, coming out of the kitchen with Zayn’s phone in hand, the fresh aroma of coffee following. He watched her in awe, mesmerized by the brown curve of her head as she leaned down to hand it to him. Recalled the times he had tried to grip Liam’s short buzz while he fucked him from behind, growling with frustration when he couldn’t get a proper handful of it.

“Thank you,” he mumbled, taking the phone. 

He turned his phone on to see, thankfully, only a few texts from Malay, and one from Gigi Hadid, the model he had met a few weekends back at some mixer in New York. He turned his phone to silent and attempted to sit up again, wrapping himself in the quilt. This time, the pain was more bearable. 

The girl had gone back into the kitchen, and after a few minutes, came back into the living room carrying two large mugs of coffee. She handed one to Zayn, who nodded in thanks, and took a quick sip. It was hot, black, and strong. Perfect. 

“Shit, that’s good,” he muttered, taking another sip and watching her sit down out of the corner of his eye. 

“Right?” the girl replied, crossing her legs on the coffee table and studying Zayn closely. For some reason he didn’t feel uncomfortable at all in the apartment of this stranger. She hadn’t screamed or cried yet, so he suspected that she might not even recognize him. The more he watched her watch him, the differences between her and Liam became more pronounced; her cheekbones were higher, her eyes wider set, her eyebrows more arched. Her ears were gauged and she was quite short. But still. 

“So are you gonna ask me what happened last night, or are you just gonna stare at me?” the girl said suddenly, setting her mug down beside her and interlocking her fingers. “I’m Jess, by the way. And yes, I do recognize you now, but no, I did not know who you were last night. But don’t worry, I’m not gonna rat you out or anything. My phone’s in the kitchen anyway. And I don’t have any hidden cameras in here,” Jess exhaled in one long breath. She stared expectantly. 

“Right, thanks for that,” Zayn said, for lack of anything better to say. God, he had a killer head ache. “So, er, d’you mind telling me what happened?” 

Jess laughed, picking up her coffee mug and taking a long gulp before answering. “Well, it’s actually not that great of a story. You were drinking at the pub where I work, and I’d clocked in around eleven, and the girl who I was relieving said you’d already had quite a few, but you honestly didn’t look drunk at all to me, so when you kept calling me over to the edge of the bar asking for more, I didn’t really think twice,” she told him, taking another sip in between sentences. “Anyway, I was starting to close up around two and I kept asking you if you were okay getting home and you kept kind of mumbling something, I wasn’t really sure what you were saying, but eventually I was the only one left closing up and I really had to get you to leave. So I helped you walk out and locked the door behind me and, uh, you kind of turned around and yakked all over the sidewalk. So I called a cab and asked for your address but you didn’t seem to know what it was so I just took you back to mine,” Jess finished.

“Oh fuck,” Zayn moaned, feeling embarrassed. He remembered now, a sliver of a memory of being bent over the frigid sidewalk, hauling his stomach contents across the snowy ground. Feeling cold. Turning around and seeing someone who looked so, so much like Liam that he just had to… “Wait, we didn’t - like, you and me-“ he gestured between them frantically. 

“What? Oh, no, nothing happened. You did touch my ass a few times on the way up the stairs, but honestly, you were so far gone I doubt you could have handled more than that,” Jess laughed. “Also I’m, like, hella into girls. So you’re in the clear.”

“Oh…good. I’m - I’m sorry about touching your ass. And everything else, really. I’m really fucking sorry, Jess. You didn’t have to take care of me like this, I mean, you don’t even know me, like-“

“Dude, it’s no problem. I’ve been in this situation before, on both sides of it. Happens to the best of us,” she winked, grinning. Zayn smiled weakly and swallowed more coffee. 

“S’pose it does,” he sighed, head spinning. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been this hungover. “But still, can I repay you somehow? Like, anything at all?” he asked, gulping down the rest of his coffee.

He could tell Jess was about to protest, but then a mischievous smile snuck across her face. “Actually, there is. I, uh, when I took your jacket off, your weed fell out, and I put it back but like, I’d really love a spliff right now. I just ran out the other day.”

Zayn grinned then, full on, even though it hurt his cheeks like hell. Despite the fact that he smelled like shit, felt like an unwashed dog, and was still trying to comprehend the fact that he had gone home with someone who looked like Liam and what that meant, he figured a spliff with a girl from California might not be a bad way to start his day of recovery. The situation was strange enough already - honestly, the past month had been even stranger, so what the hell. So, reaching for his jacket, Zayn shrugged and replied, “A spliff it is.”

~~~

A few days later, as he sat with his mum in his backyard, Zayn found himself unable to hold it all in any longer. When she asked him how he was, he told her the truth (“I’ve been shit, mum”) and when she asked why, he told her the real reason (“Liam”). She nodded and Zayn realized that she probably already knew anyway, mums had a way of doing that. He took a deep hit off his spliff and offered it to her, and she just laughed at him and took another sip of the double brandy he’d poured for her in his pub. 

“D’you want to talk about it, love?” she asked gently, wincing a bit as the brandy went down. They were sitting in front of the large telly downstairs, on the thick shag rug, a pizza box and the liquor bottle littered around them. There was a footy match playing, but neither of them was paying much attention to the screen. 

“Dunno,” Zayn shrugged. “Not sure if there’s much point in even trying anymore. Like, we’ve got our own lives now. He probably doesn’t think about me anymore. I feel weird, like, it feels weird, how much I think about him. It’s probably not normal.” He turned his head to the side to see Trisha staring at him, half her face illuminated by the glow from the telly. 

“Oh, Zayn,” she sighed, leaning over to pluck the spliff from his hand. He watched in awe as she inhaled, exhaled, coughed twice. 

“Mum!” he exclaimed, laughing. She smiled sheepishly and handed the spliff back to him. 

“There’s that smile I’ve been waiting for,” she said quietly, rubbing Zayn’s cheek. “We’ve all missed you, Zayn. You work too hard. I worry about you, love.”

“Mum, there’s nothing to worry about, honest. This is just something I’ve got to sort out on my own. I just…I don’t know how to.”

He crushed the spliff, turned down the volume on the telly, and lay down so that his head rested in his mum’s lap. Her hands went immediately to his hair, a gesture that reminded him of Liam and also of Harry. Suddenly he missed them both terribly. 

“You’ll figure it out, love. The best things in life are the ones worth fighting for, and lord knows you’ve been fighting for Liam since the beginning. I wouldn’t give up just yet.”

Zayn looked up at her, the familiar lines of her face, the soft curve of her smile. He nestled against her stomach and fell asleep quickly. 

 

~~~

 

The next few weeks picked up with unprecedented pace. Malay was flying him back and forth between London, New York, and LA, meeting with other producers, recording with a few artists here and there, putting final touches on track lists, and doing some early-stage interviews about the upcoming album. Zayn had always known the title; it had been one of the first things he’d decided firmly on but never told anyone about, except Malay of course.

Mind of Mine, he mused to himself one evening in New York. His mind had been noticeably absent these past few days with the insane hustle and bustle that was starting to take over as January loomed. Exhaustion bloomed in his eyelids whenever he closed his eyes, and his entire body felt sore.

He was currently talking to Gigi Hadid on the balcony of an enormous apartment in Brooklyn, overlooking the sprawling Manhattan skyline. Malay had suggested that Zayn ask her to star in the music video for Pillowtalk, after he’d disjointedly tried to explain the idea that he had for the video while extremely stoned. It hadn’t taken much to persuade her, and she’d since taken it upon herself to latch onto Zayn at every event they attended together and try to get him alone.

Zayn downed a flute of champagne in one gulp as a waiter brought around a tray, and hastily picked up two more as Gigi giggled beside him. She was alright personality-wise, he supposed, compared to some of the other models he’d had the chance to socialize with in his five years of fame. Witty, not over-the-top, never drank too much. 

He wondered if she would fuck him, if she would let him fuck her in the ass. As her fingers lightly danced along his knee, Zayn decided to find out.

“Wanna get out of here?” he murmured in her ear, her thick hair brushing against his face as he kept his voice down. 

“For sure,” she faux-whispered before standing up. “Let me get my purse,” she said, and disappeared briefly. Zayn drowned the other two champagne flutes quickly and stood, feeling a delightful warm head rush as he did. A perfect amount of drunk, he told himself as he ducked inside and wedged through the throngs of people, meeting Gigi at the door. She grabbed his arm tightly and smiled at the paparazzi who sprang out of the bushes as they got into a taxi and drove away. 

The tiredness in his limbs somehow seemed to feed his lazy sexual energy, as he carelessly let his fingers slide under Gigi’s skirt in the backseat of the taxi and travel up her thigh. She shuddered and spread her legs wider. Zayn smiled. 

Later that night, in his apartment, as he pounded into her ruthlessly, Zayn closed his eyes and tried to remember the last time he’d fucked a girl and liked it. He came up blank. As Gigi moaned beneath him, Zayn squeezed her skinny thigh tightly, slapped the side of her ass. He turned her over onto her stomach and shoved himself back inside roughly, and she screamed. 

“Oh yes baby, oh fuck me harder,” she cried, sounding like an actual porn star, moans drowning out the sound of his phone buzzing on the bedside table. Zayn shuddered and slapped her ass hard, harder, watching as it turned pink beneath his hand. Gigi’s skin was paler than Liam’s, turned red more readily. 

The thought made him come almost instantly. 

 

~~~ 

The next morning, Zayn woke up early. He rolled over to check his phone and saw that he had two missed calls and a voicemail from an unknown number. He sat up and wandered into the kitchen as he opened his voicemail box and pressed play on the newest message. When Liam’s voice rang in his ear, he nearly dropped the phone. “Hey, uh, it’s me-“

Recovering quickly, Zayn sank down onto the kitchen floor, clutching the phone tightly to his ear. “I’m, uh, here at your house, I think, I’ve rung the bell a few times but I guess you’re not here right now. Anyway just wanted to let you know that I came by. You’re probably just sleeping. I’m gonna go now. Right then, bye.” 

There was a poignant silence that filled the air. Then Zayn muttered, “Fuck,” and immediately called Malay. 

“Bro, it’s five in the morn-“

“Malay, I need you to get me on the next plane to London. Out of JFK. It’s urgent. Text me the details.”

Without bothering to hear his reply, Zayn hung up and sprinted into the bedroom, grabbing a suitcase from his closet and throwing in a few shirts and hoodies. He yelped in surprise when he turned and saw Gigi still sleeping on his bed, completely having forgotten about her there. 

“Shit, uh, babe?” he hissed, poking her limp foot. “Gigi?”

“Hmmm?” she mumbled, rolling over in the sheets. 

“Babe, I’ve got to go to London, I’m really sorry about this, but I’ll see you next week, yeah? For the video?”

“Mhmm,” came the muffled reply. 

“Fuck it then,” Zayn said, zipping up his bag, throwing on a sweatshirt, and grabbing his favorite sneakers. He scribbled her a quick note, left it on the pillow, then dashed out the door.

As he sat in a cab driving out to the airport, Zayn stared out the window, heart beating fast. Liam had shown up. He’d come to see Zayn. And Zayn hadn’t been there, hadn’t even been in the country. 

Fuck. This time, he promised himself, he wouldn’t fuck it up. This time, he would tell Liam the truth

**Author's Note:**

> Another chapter coming soon, from Zayn's POV #staytuned. And don't worry, the mature stuff is on its way :)


End file.
